In a continuation of the Williamson’s bold steps into more ambitious contemporary programming, Di Mainstone’s Subterranean Elevator creates an immersive, sensory space for play, meditation and hypnosis.
Subterranean Elevator presents a challenge to its viewer: descend.
Descend into the earth and into a shared subconscious. Feel the earth between your toes, consider the life forms even in this sterile sand, and the new synapses you create in yourself while you fall deeper into the proposed hypnosis.
It’s a big challenge, and bold for audiences walking straight out of the adjoining Albert Richards collection display next door, who, I can only imagine, aren’t expecting immersive audio-visual art to follow oil paintings and water colours. But that’s kind of beautiful, because it’s not politically charged, it’s not othering anyone or anything, it’s just a statement about how intensely precious our earth is, and how deeply we’re all connected to it.
So you, as the viewer, get to be part of that. Let the work prove to you how precious the planet is. Let yourself fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the meditation provided by unfamiliar shapes and unearthly combinations of colour and motion, because, if you do, you’ll have found some part of you, however small, that wanted to feel closer to the sand, and soil, and water, that makes us up.
And from there, go out into the world and make changes.
—
Di Mainstone’s Subterranean Elevator is open at Williamson Art Gallery & Museum until December 2025
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith