Palantir
Palantir
2020
Dimensions variable
The original images featured in the Palantir paintings are night vision photographs. The works emerged early during lockdown when everything fell silent outdoors and people turned to social media to make a noise.
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram became forums for attack, platforms used to hunt and take people down. A primal herd instinct reared its beastly head through the medium of digital technology.
The paintings, like our online records, capture a fleeting, furtive moment of disquiet; a shadowy record of the predator and its prey.
A palantír is a magical artefact used as a communication device to see events in J.R. Tolkien's fictional Middle Earth.
The artefacts were often an unreliable guide to what was happening, particularly if they had fallen into the enemy's hands making their overall usefulness questionable.