Since the beginning, we’ve dreamt. Sleepwalking, half in the sensorial world and half in the oneiric one. Our species has been set apart by the ability to construct our reality, to combine different parts of the myriad worlds we inhabit and create story.
The oldest known piece of figurative zoomorphic art, the lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, is a mysterious lion-headed godlet from the Upper Paleolithic. It’s 40,000 year old evolutionary evidence of humanity’s thus far unique cognition and our innate understanding of a world beyond what we perceive. An ancestral dream of nature and man combining into something wild, sacred and unknown. It’s purpose lost to time, we know of it only what we see staring back at us across the millennia: an oneiric chimera carved by the hands of our mothers and fathers. Continuing in the tradition of our ancestors, Lion Man is a bridge to worlds unseen, a link from the waking reality to the dream one where man and nature hybridize into mutant new forms. With it I reach across the eons, and through the membranes that divide worlds. In place of a burin I use the machine to fuse my body with the wild. Instead of dreaming in stone, I dream in code.
Created using a databank of selfies, and a selection of botanical and animal art from across the centuries, with playform.io. Inspired in part by Living With The Gods, a BBC Radio 4 podcast.
