Carina Wyatt

My placement was within a London hospice. A client likened dying to the Minotaur’s plight suspended in time within the labyrinth. The labyrinth, much like dying, can be seen as a perilous, disorientating place of negotiation, sealed off from the well and connected to life by a fragile thread. Labyrinths are explored with both body and mind as spaces of vicissitudes, there is a longing to know where we are going, but from ground level there is no overview except uncertainty. My images explore the embracing of polarities that dying allows, a rhythmic move between the existential, the banal, the despair and the witty in a rapidly changing focus. Dying is an erasure, torturous, shitty and unfair but I learnt that hope can remain dynamic not necessarily to evade dying but within the desire for meanders and being lost on new paths. Foucault (1967) described the labyrinth as an obscure region between birth and knowing oneself.

Foucault, Michel: Death and the labyrinth: The world of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas, London: Athlone Press, 1967.