“I’ve always wanted to run wild in my local cemetery. I found the perfect person to bring my fantasy to life. This photobook emerged out of a shoot that exceeded all my expectations and seemed to naturally bring up themes associated with a place that is for the dead as much as it is for the living. Now a conservation area, the cemetery is also a well-known cruising ground. Sex, death, the Garden of Eden, temptation, gender, Orpheus, communing with nature, lust for life and the earth… they all seemed to find expression in the few hours we let loose in North London.
In His Sleep is the result of that.
‘All acts of creation are gestures of becoming, restless urges to emerge into something new, a transformation out of loneliness… In this realm of overgrowth and tombstones, wildness above, skeletons below, I am Orpheus back from the underworld, head crazed by visions of the one I left behind. Sweet Eurydice, gone. This is me, lusting after beasts, copulating with the earth, reaching back, aroused by fungus and ivy, the way it wraps itself around bark and marble and concrete. Everything clings, even the air.’ (extract from In His Sleep.)
In His Sleep is the third in the One-a-Month challenge that started in October 2016. - Michael Wynne
