STRATA:
EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 14/11/25 - 10/1/26
INTRODUCTION :
Anima Mundi are delighted to present ‘Strata': three solo exhibitions from Jackson Whitefield, Youki Hirakawa and Oliver Raymond Barker.
Each artist explores through the lens to examine the deep interrelation between the human body and the earth — how one navigates, shapes, measures, and remembers the other. The three exhibitions unfold across the building’s floors like layers in the ground.
Each artist explores through the lens to examine the deep interrelation between the human body and the earth — how one navigates, shapes, measures, and remembers the other. The three exhibitions unfold across the building’s floors like layers in the ground.
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On the ground floor, Jackson Whitefield’s ‘Datum' translates movement through the landscape into sculptural and photographic form. Each step becomes a measure; each surface a register of contact. Through walking, climbing, and mapping, Whitefield explores how action and matter converge. His sculptural frames and dissected black-and-white prints hold the memory of terrain — not as representation, but as a physical record of experience.
On the middle floor, Youki Hirakawa’s ‘Axis' explores our layered relationship with nature. The double-sided video totem ‘Torso’ presents the body of a climber shaped by rock, reversing the traditional creator–muse relationship in art. Shown alongside 'Coaled Sky' and 'Tree and Two Stumps', these works move between destruction and renewal, reflecting on the tension between human intervention and the quiet persistence of the natural world.
On the top floor, Oliver Raymond Barker’s ‘Trinity' is a meditative journey into landscape and time. Made using a custom-built ‘backpack’ camera obscura, Barker’s large-format negatives are produced on-site in remote locations. Centred on the Rosneath peninsula in Scotland — a place layered with histories of pilgrimage, protest, and control - ‘Trinity' entwines the elemental, the political, and the spiritual, reflecting on how land holds both conflict and sanctuary.
In place of spiritual ascent, ‘Strata' seeks honest connection in the material world, through the body’s contact with the ground. Movement through terrain becomes a kind of secular pilgrimage. Across these three solo exhibitions, Strata reveals ground and skin as both origin and witness — a complex, mutable record of contact, history, and continual transformation.
Joseph Clarke, 2025
“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”