DEMONS LAND challenges established ways of thinking: about the past; about the possibilities of collaborative practice; about the relationship between the arts, education, and urgent political questions.
In our project, the poem is a land, and the land is a poem. But whose land, and whose poem?
The original poem was written in Ireland in the most violent years of the Elizabethan conquest. Spenser was one of the new English, taking the lands of the Irish, resolved to reform their religion and subdue their culture. The imaginative premise of our project is that subsequent global history has been a tale of this poem coming differently, imperfectly to life. The poem becomes the text of the unfinished modern world.
DEMONS LAND asks: what might it mean for a poem to come true?
Each DEMONS LAND installation is uniquely adapted to the history and architecture of its host site.
The project began in 2011 as a series of intensive workshops with teenagers in multi-faith comprehensive schools in Leyton and Woking.
From these sessions, a full, dramatic reimagining of Spenser’s poem appeared. The play was performed at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Forest; at King’s Place, London; at the Burton Taylor Theatre, Oxford; and New Fortune Theatre, Perth.
The setting for the play was a mash-up of Fairyland and the nineteenth century prison island of Van Diemen’s Land - Britain’s most notorious colony, in which new world-building came at the price of attempted genocide.
Over time, our playworld gave birth to multimedia recursions and extensions: paintings, sculptures, songs, costumes, digital works, and a film. The spin-offs continue to this day.
In 2016, a selection of these works were shown at The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and stood as the centrepiece and culmination of their event LIVEFRIDAY: FRIGHTFRIDAY.
The project’s first major installation was an unprecedented collaboration with the National Trust in 2017, in which the celebrated temples and gardens of Stowe – an iconic site of Britain’s ambivalent history - became host to our story.
Lord Cobham’s intention for Stowe was directly inspired by THE FAERIE QUEENE. With its temples, hermitage, grotto, and woods, Stowe offers an arresting translation of Spenser’s vision. It is a place of visionary dreams and political resistance; a place where temptation might be at once expressed and overcome. The gardens and building were to be a poem come true. But Stowe also embodies the darker side of wealth, beauty, and empire. Extravagant waste, luxury, and inequality, built in part upon the spoils of war and the slave trade; an ideology of remorseless overseas expansion, in which assumptions of cultural superiority entailed religious persecution and the repudiation of indigenous rights.
Demons Land: a poem come true ran for two months and occupied the entire 250 acres. The following artistic outputs were installed:
30 paintings (each 170cm x 170cm)
40 minute film (colour | 16:9)
soundscape installation
exhibition of historical and literary context
In 2018, Demons Land: a poem come true shifted shape for a run at The Old Fire Station, Oxford. At the installation’s centre were two evening events, which presented a selection of scenes from the play, followed by a screening of the film. The theatre was winged by sculptures, expanding the story world beyond the limits of the stage and screen. A selection of the Demons Land paintings were exhibited in the adjacent gallery.
Since then the film has travelled extensively in the UK and internationally, with screenings in Sydney, Hobart, Perth, New York City, Oxford, Cambridge, Norwich, the Queen’s Theatre Belfast, and at the RSC’s Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. The film featured for 2 months as part of the Ecstasy exhibition at the UQ Art Gallery, Brisbane. Connections established here paved the way for the full collaboration now developing in Queensland.