STANDALONE
Standalone is the name of the woodland area that has become a visual and emotional metaphor for my experience with depression, anxiety, and avoidance. Its name, both literal and symbolic, reflects the isolation and introspection that define my relationship with this landscape.
This is a place of contradiction, at once still and unchanging, yet capable of sudden, violent transformation. It offers refuge, a quiet asylum from the intrusive thoughts that accompany mental illness. Its silent paths guide me toward solitude and reflection. Yet within this sanctuary lies a persistent unease. Human presence, though rarely encountered directly, is etched into the terrain through scattered remnants of both contemporary and historical activity.
Standalone is a haunted landscape, steeped in memory and marked by its industrial past. Once the site of a drift mine, the woodland was largely felled during the Second World War and only replanted decades later in the 1970s. These layers of history, visible and invisible, infuse the space with a spectral quality, echoing the psychological terrain I navigate within it.
Through this work, I seek to articulate the tension between safety and vulnerability, solitude and haunting, and to explore how landscape can embody and reflect the inner workings of the mind.
