Michael Curran

'The image of the loved one appears, first of all with a precarious brilliance. It illuminates and at the same time frightens the one who follows it with his eyes.'
Bataille

You can see Michael's search for the Snow Queen as a reflection in time of Sacher-Masoch's pursuit of Venus in Furs. Twin drives are embodied here: Thanatos and Eros. The epistemology of Love in a Cold Climate is imprinted like a series of psychic birthmarks throughout the earlier work. The shards of Hans Christian Andersen's broken mirror reflect and deflect the thematics to produce fractured narratives, false starts and indeed, 'the opposite of a cliff-hanger'. Storytelling, like the camera obscura allows a play of moving images onto the surface of your psyche. There is a structural complicity with dreaming, with its incubation in dark places. As you light the lamp or switch on the projector, you will find a crystalline construction that refracts and diffracts rainbows of narrative, fistulae and paths between here and there, now and then.

'And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are among how many others, the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves…A kind of homecoming.'

Do not be deceived, this last lamp does not give more light - the dark has only become more absorbed in itself.'
Celan

Louisa Minkin