— John O’ Donohue

 

The mirrored heads of dogs appear on a cross in the Lindisfarne Gospels (715–720 AD), as Celtic motifs serve Christian iconography. Venerated within Celtic cosmology as a symbol of guardianship, the dog reappears as a haunting shape on the sands of Maraetai. Thom Hinton, an artist born in the West Midlands, follows the Doberman’s movements on Super 8 film, observing the dark shape whilst imprinting his own gestures on the sand. The ancient elements of Hinton’s tablets are evoked, as the artist traces the dog with reverence, and the film shifts between light and darkness.

Carved in black-stained Spanish Chestnut, the woodwork of Erika Holm renders the Christian cosmos through the late-medieval. The prie-dieu chair of St Claire (2024) enacts a vernacular architecture of prayer, and the gallery is reframed as a cloister. The religious apparatus would have been familiar to Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Christian mystic whose Interior Castle (1588) described the “spouse” of Christ in the amorous terms of “divine touch”. Holm extends this carnal-impulse of Catholicism onto the surface of the chair, sculpting a facsimile of the artist’s abdomen that forms a new meditation on the body.

Across Dogsbody, there is the act of knotting and braiding, as divergent cosmologies are woven together. Through the sculpting of hair in wood and Pictish-knots in graphite, the artists recall a bodily carving out, a truth of sense through spiritual structure. Within the Celtic and Medieval reference points, philosophy is always indistinguishable from theology, and questions of the temporal realm are mediated through the divine. Dogsbody poses new meditations, as a phallus empties a font of holy water, and a landscape is contained within Celtic scripture.

A triptych appears at the entrance to Dogsbody, and mirrors cast out-selves among the pre-modern knowledge. The font appears diminutive—a  vanity of girlhood—as the future opens into the reflections of a deep-remembered past. Hinton affirms this past as “containing signs that point to the present”, as the artist’s arching charcoal lines carry the temporal line of Dogsbody adrift amid ancestral knowledge.