Correspondence from a Thin Place
Presented by Kudos, held at Barometer Gallery
08 - 15 July 2025
In Celtic Mythology, a thin place is a site where the boundaries between earthly and spiritual realms is unusually narrow, and easily crossed. Both formidable and reverent, thin places can be found where elements meet: where autonomous and unpredictable natural phenomena create fissures, portals and interfaces between known and unknown realms. Fire is one of these thin places. It is said that fire keeps the spirits out, but sometimes, it also invites them in.
Building on the arcane belief that spirits speak with the living through fire, this exhibition alludes to histories of pyromancy: an ancient practice where the movements, sounds, or colours of flames are read as omens or messages from another world. Images of a bonfire are methodically abstracted into a typographic form— a framework built to give structure to spectral transmissions, and to try and make legible the voices of ghosts.
Imagining that there are stories hidden in the licks of flame, Correspondence from a Thin Place asks if and how we can read messages from beyond, who gets to interpret them, and how communication crosses from the immaterial to the material. Here, flame is an interlocutor: something that speaks to those who know how to listen.