“Rance’s work as a whole both reveals and acknowledges the disturbing things
that are going on around us before offering us an alternative or means
of protection; uniting the knowing and the notknowing, the visible and
the invisible, the supernatural and the rational, the loving and the
terrible.”
Anna McNay, Assistant Editor, Art Quarterly
Anna McNay, Assistant Editor, Art Quarterly
'Otherworld' is a series started in 2015. For the exhibition at The White Box in 2019 Rance imagined Blackheath as it once
was, and could be once again if it were re-inhabited by its lost creatures and
local spirits.
She looked at the connections between humans, animals and nature and creates tiny
detailed pewter characters from her imagination and mythology, setting them in
tableaux scenes.
Responding
to the location and the time of the mad March hare, Rance also showed a new
series of talismanic sculptures based on The
Three Hares, an ancient archetypal symbol. She sees the motif as a
way of honouring our precious declining wildlife, as well as being a helpful
counter to the conflicted and binary splitting of current world views.
She
writes:
"In 1859
the Greenwich Natural History Society made a record of fauna on Blackheath.
The animal species recorded included Natterjack toads, hares, lizards, bats, quail, ring ouzel and nightingales. Today the bats are the
only regular inhabitants on that list. Otherworld, my exhibition opening on
March 1st is on Hare and Billet Road. Opposite is the Hare and Billet Pond
which has the most natural wildlife of the three ponds on Blackheath. There are many
residents and local experts who work hard to protect the wildlife that we have
left on Blackheath which is in the boroughs of Lewisham and Greenwich. It is
acid grassland, a site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation, with
an impressive number of bees, wasps and ants species recorded, the most recent study is by David Notton of
The Natural History Museum. It is also used regularly by humans for
fairs and festivals such as On Blackheath and the fireworks on or around Guy
Fawkes day, sports, kite flying, dog walking and picnics. At over 200 acres it
is one of the largest areas of common land in Greater London. The Blackheath
Joint Working Party, Greenwich Wildlife Action Group and The Blackheath Society
are among local amenity groups which help protect it and educate about it.
My point of view as an artist is to
honour it by evoking a different type of world, one which is lost not just to
the Heath but to most of Western Society. This is a world in which our
connection to nature is imagined through nature spirits. Last year before a
visit to The Outer Hebrides I read Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD to the
Present by Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook. It
is a scholarly history of fairy sightings, which amazingly enough do continue
in the UK. There is still a remnant of belief in these hobgoblins, elves,
dryads and fairies of our old stories which screamed when trees were cut down,
punished when sacred places were violated or caused mayhem when certain animals
were killed without due care and respect. If we still all had respect for these
old superstitions (as they do in Iceland) perhaps the destruction of natural
habitats would be far less prevalent, climate change not such a threat, and
we’d even still have brown hares running around on
Blackheath. For Otherworld I have discovered (in my research,
dreams and imagination) some creatures whose job it is to haunt and protect the
Heath through fear or favour."
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Four Sisters (Creek) 2015 pewter 13cm h | |
 |
| Loki and the Sheep 2016 |
 | ||||||
| Hermit 2019 pewter 12cm h |
 | |||||||||
| Hare 2015 pewter 6cm h |
 |
| Triskele 2018 pewter 7cm |
