Buried Below, (2017)

‘Buried Below’, 2016, can act as a complement to ‘We Are Stardust’. Here is the microcosmos of the earth, the initial literal destination of the buried body. Again, there are invented forms mixed in with the observation – inner feelings with the objective record of an emotionally charged spot. For this is the ground Ballard drew when she returned to her mother’s grave in Spain. Ballard reports, on entering Neolithic burial chambers in the Orkneys, that she felt how, in the weather-dependent agricultural communities that first settled the land, ‘the boundary between life and death may have been porous: ancestors were alive in the afterlife working on behalf of the living to ensure the sun shone and the rain came.’ ‘Buried Below’ generates a comparable sense of posthumous influence.
Text by Paul Carey-Kent