Arcana
Briscoe Park

In Arcana, human-made structures appear to unravel and loom, while the surrounding fog itself seems human-made, like a smoke machine on a film set. Simultaneously, this place appears far removed from human touch – a brief glance into a parallel universe. 

Briscoe Park’s photographs, collected for the first time in this book, intend to mystify. The particular process of discovery and documentation practised by Briscoe is coupled with his use of light to disrupt the intimacy between himself, as observer, and the sanctity of a moment that would have otherwise passed unseen. The benign and inquisitive eyes of Scottish sheep turn demonic and uncanny – responding to a camera flash in the darkness – and the windows of a derelict chapel emit an intense red glare as though barely containing what is harboured within. 

Collecting locations ranging from the beautiful, rugged terrain of Dartmoor, England, to the expansive vistas of the Pacific Northwest – Briscoe likens his craft to ‘map building’. This working method is the link that ties each of these scenes into the same imagined place. As on Earth, the same moon that illuminates certain scenes appears in others – uniting them in a silvery unveiling of space and time and revealing a path between previously disparate areas. In a similar way, people punctuate the landscapes in Arcana like full stops, their existence within the frame marking the instant they were reborn as a character in Briscoe’s world – both permanent and impermanent. A secret society forms, its members both perceivers and the perceived, existing in the plane between the ethereal scenes depicted in Arcana and those who view them.