'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm." 

Wilderness occupies a prime site in contemporary everyday life. It is of very special interest to a significant section of the global general public who remain fascinated by the wilds – or raw nature untrammelled by humans – and are terrified that this will imminently disappear in the relentless advance of all that conveniently trades under the name of progress.

Wilderness is equally of vital concern to a number of professional and interest groups who share a passion for the wild and unrestrained in nature, but have a very different practical involvement with it: in particular, conservationists, ecologists, naturalists, explorers, park rangers – as ‘wilderness’ is a category of national park in the USA – and creative and academic professionals involved with the constructed, non-constructed, or deconstructed environment, such as landscape architects, urban designers, land artists, and art historians.

For psychoanalysts too wilderness is a crucial category as it represents either the frightening ‘dark night of the soul’, or a psychic realm dominated by wild desires and aggressive impulses that can become either utterly destructive or function as a wildlife preserve in the civilised world, a refuge within which inarticulate, undomesticated private creative initiatives are protected from extinction.

Finally, there are all those aficionados devoted to the wilds in human nature – in particular, those that follow solitary journeys into the wilderness to confront everything raw and boundary-less inside and outside themselves in order to discover a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ ground to continue living.

This journey through the wilderness has been variously recounted and immortalized by the major world religions, psychoanalysis, epic literature, and more recently, cinema.  Strangely, until now, this motley array of wilderness fans have never managed to gather under the same roof before – never mind the same firmament! - even though it is very evident that they have much to share, and there is great future potential in their collaboration.

A first thing for them to share is the celebration of wilderness in all its cultural diversity. Visually, for example, wilderness ranges from the depiction of a rich and verdant hinterland between the urban and rural landscapes (such as in 15 century European painting), to a non-plant, non-animal, non-human, totally barren desert – as ‘wilderness’ is translated in some languages (such as French) by the word desert.

Then there are the huge basic life-questions and core-assumptions that underlie these different perspectives on wilderness: for example, is there indeed any non-human wild nature that is unmediated by human perception, with all its linguistic and cultural coding? Or does this current concern for wilderness actually in fact constitute a post mortem following the loss of any real untouched landscape? Perhaps all the wildness on the planet is currently in transformation into a commodity, and all-inclusive package tours to visit it lie just round the corner? Or perhaps, alternatively, the wild in nature forever persists no matter how aggressively humans attempt to construct over or through it, just as plants naturally re-occupy bombsites, or insects re-inhabit toxic waste?

Then there remain all the residual hinterland questions that also poignantly haunt wilderness: for example, is this basic non-human inhospitable space we equally call wilderness simply a dumping ground for all the trash generated by human excess and exploitation, where catastrophe forever lies hidden, and lurks in some virtual wild way – like the slag heap at Aberfan, Ground Zero in Manhattan, or the abandoned apartment blocks at Chernobyl?

Is the allure of such places not generated principally by guilt (about human pollution), and anxiety (about the death of the planet), rather than by some sublime transport before the unknown and infinite expanse of wild nature? 

Wilderness and Inner Space is a multi-faceted event designed to feed these contrasting celebratory and critical aspects of wilderness.

The event involves an exhibition of original artwork (principally by the members of the organizing group); an installation featuring fine art and photographic representations of wilderness; a sound work; various special interest presentations; and a two-day conference on the theme including lectures by prominent speakers that cover the (landscape) architecture, art (historical), (eco) psychological, and religious (practice/studies) dimensions of this wild terrain.