Lava on Snow is an exploratory video, a walk in progress that brings together two artists moving through places of special resonance in their first collaboration.

A moving portrait of people and place. Of coming and going, being and belonging. The there and then of another time and location configured into the here and now of lived experience. Alluding to the constantly shifting, elusive and fragmentary nature of memory and sense recollection. The tread on fresh snow and hardened lava.

The two landscapes where the narrative unfolds are – in different ways – of difficult and challenging natural conditions; heavy snow and settled lava, landscapes that are prone to quick radical transformation, are visually powerful and reminiscent of shared fantastic and magical imagery.

In the landscape, the frivolity of an incomplete structure, without purpose, of the ruined constructed Victorian folly, built to entertain in an era long gone, juxtaposed by the somnambulant walk along a basalt road salvaged from the remnants of a brutal and unpredictable volcanic landscape.

In the piece, the two turned figures only meet in the representational space of the narrative constructed by the video editing. Filmed in the process of walking and disappearing – from the frame and behind a folly – in each setting the camera follows the subject, in a reciprocal performative gesture, that leads the viewer into a place before eluding us.

Spectators as observers of the situation can project themselves into the traversed landscape, only to find a significant part of their vista blocked by the body of the wanderer, the followed figure therefore becoming an integrated part of the viewed landscape as well as the perceiver of the walking experience.

Fragment; an isolated or incomplete part of something.

Folly; a costly ornamental building with no practical purpose, especially a tower or mock-Gothic ruin built in a large garden or park.

Footfall; the sound of a footstep or footsteps.

in www.oxforddictionaries.com (1st May 2013)