The Dazzling Far-Near (2025)

‘The Dazzling Far-Near' is a new audio-visual installation made for 36 Gallery by Newcastle-based artist/composer Jayne Dent. Touch responsive e-textile banners activate fragments of a disembodied choral composition, a morphing and hypnotic soundscape shaped through audience interaction. This exhibition explores ideas of communion, sacred folk tradition, and the potential role of technology as a mediator of transcendent experience.

The title ‘The Dazzling Far-Near’ is taken from the writing of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 12th Century poet and mystic who conceptualised the abstract relational space between human and divine as the ‘far-near’.

How do you commune with the invisible? Where do you meet? Shapes of sanctuary blueprints and open doors, this visible, divisible light. Mirrors to step through, reflections and shadows, eyes closed, hands clasped, a spiritual experience. A ladder to climb, a call and response, turning inward and reaching out. Getting lost in mapping and making and remembering. Open the songbook at any page and sing: voices synchronised, sit together in dazzling light.