Bertien van manen +beyond maps and atlases

Bertien van Manen

Beyond Maps and Atlases

MACK

The rapacious threat of darkness was rapidly consuming the last glimmers of that day’s light, as crystalised raindrops penetrated every fibre of my impotent clothing.

I was alone, clambering through the savage bracken of Ireland’s West Coast, in a desperate and hopeless scrabble to locate the refuge of my misplaced lodgings.

Some two decades have passed, but as I turn the pages of Bertien van Manen’s Beyond Maps and Atlases, I revisit the labyrinth of that day’s memory – thrust into the intersection between the forgotten, fragmented details of the tangible and the clouded folly of the imagined.

Beyond Maps and Atlases is a reflective journey through an unknown, mythical, rain-sodden landscape to a place that lies beyond the physical; a place that oscillates between the extinct and extant, between the circumstantial and the metaphorical, between life and death.

Battered by wind, and largely smothered by the heavy gloom o