Melancholia

Loraine Morley

I live and work on a remote and largely wild ten acres in Mid-Wales. It’s been an appropriate location for my artistic practice, which began fifteen years ago and was initiated by the need for a creative means of exploring and giving form to an obscure and tangled inner landscape. 

‘Depression’ is the clinical term given to such states of mind, though I would use the older expression of ‘melancholia’ which has an historical and philosophical richness and breadth lacking in the clinical term.

In terms of my own experience of melancholia certain themes have over the years emerged.   I view these as part of an existential terrain, a marginal place of the broken, the lost, the ephemeral, the unwanted, the nameless, the wordless. 

I began my practice from the beginning with a commitment to using only recycled, degradable and non-toxic materials. Waste-paper, cardboard, pre-used textiles.   There was an environmental and economic concern in this choice, but also a conceptual concern, which might be described as an attempt to reclaim something from the detritus.