Vincent Ward  +  

A palimpsest is a reinvention. The scarcity of parchment, a writing surface made from animal skin, led to its reuse during the Middle Ages through the careful scraping away of layers of ink to make way for new text. The re-used document was a palimpsest – a text with the ghost of its previous use faintly visible behind the new script.

As a starting point Ward contemplated his father’s return from the war with his young bride and how his body, burnt and scarred and still under-going skin-grafts, drove him to shape and fence the rough hill country around him, defying the entropy of their experience. Palimpsest takes the notion of reinvention and applies it to the body, landscape, and memory.

Palimpsest is conceived as both a print and video environment.Two suites of still images (10–15 works each) form the physical installation, while two corresponding suites of immersive video (10–30 interwoven works) extend the series into movement and light.

Designed as fluid, site-specific architectures — corridors, labyrinths, or large open chambers — these works can manifest from a solitary screen to multi-channel immersive choreographies of up to thirty projections.