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Through the Dark Wood'

“If we looked long enough we would see things in the dark and the dark looking back would see things in us… things of the night, become one of their kind.”
Claire-Louise Bennet, A Fish out of Water

'Through the Dark Wood, brings together a selection of charcoal drawings that Goddard has made throughout his life as an artist – he returned to the medium while caring and grieving for his wife Karen who died in November 2021. The latest work in this collection was born, in part out of the need to be at home during this time – charcoal can be easily cleaned up, its precise and immediate. But the urgency of the medium also gives the work a tangible catharsis, crafting intricate details with a slight of hand that feels almost treacherous.  Taking cues from Jungian theorist James Hollis’s “Through the Dark Wood”, the drawings can be seen to represent the corners of the mind that, when explored, can bring about a new state of becoming, what Dante called the “dark wood”. In this way, the obsidian-like clouds that submerge each drawing, simultaneously reveals and conceals.

The illustrative mark making and the short story that each picture seems to tell, taps into mythologised and romantic ideas of the forest. But they are interrupted by something strange. Within the burrows and fallen leaves, there is a sense of the urban, the boggy silver mists are busy and hot like the underground. The sturgeons that belong as motifs on a19th century gas sturgeon lamp, are foreign objects that won't be dislodged – bark and lichen and worms will just grow around them. Subterrestrain mosses; carcasses; and sleeping owls are brought together like a collection of tombstones, slowly grouped together over time.

And then, an evergreen woodland, they are unmatched in their silence, thick carpeting deadens outside noise and low boughs absorb echos. The island of pines and a Japanese pagoda, a slight figure, crestfallen, in a rowing boat, exposing the enormous gravity of the roots that cling to the floating rock before them. The gnarly tubers grow in the dark like the presence of loss itself. But the sound of rustling oak leaves, the mineral splash from nocturnal bathing bodies, leaks through the darkness. The vignettes of activity; a figure with a greyhound and a boater hat; a monstrous beetle; a drowning shoal of fish. They don’t offer an escape, instead we are invited to wade through the necromantic chaos of grief.'

 

Liza-rose Burton