THE EXHIBITION

I Just Can’t Help Believing

by Claire Hazelton

Beneath the hills of the Lake District, with its entrance tucked beneath the flower beds in the back garden of an old, rickety cottage is a peculiar land where a sacred river meanders through the valleys of strange, dark mountains, before spilling into a deep, black sea that has never seen the sun. Haunting voices bounce off the sides of the mountains, lamenting loss and separation and prophesying war.

In this bizarre and dark underground landscape, however, a man – Kubla Khan – has built a most stunning construction – a pleasure dome filled with exquisite flowers and trees, with caves of listening ice: filled with perfection, magic and impossible spots of sunlight. It glows amongst all else.

Xanadu, this underground land with its impeccable pleasure dome, came to the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in an Opium-fuelled reverie. Kubla Khan, the protagonist, cuts off all contact with the
death, grief and violence present in Xanadu and lives, instead, in constructed perfection.

In reality, Coleridge, too, cloaked his children, as babies, in similar worlds of wonder – placed them under domes, in a sense, in which he allowed them only  to see the best and most beautiful of the world. In 1817, Coleridge coined the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” a term which, ultimately, means to succumb to a lie – to submit and surrender to falsity and fantasy, to pretend to believe in the unbelievable – in return for pleasure, entertainment and, at times, peace.

The notion of suspending one’s disbelief is a prevalent theme throughout – an obsession, perhaps, of the artist’s – explored in two forms. First, there is the conscious action of suspending our disbelief, in which we can create and experience truth – build whole lives and imagine them to be real – in order to enjoy films, plays and books etc. and to be entertained, rather than disappointed, by magic tricks and illusions.

Second, Semple explores the larger notion that, on a more complex level, aspects of our disbelief are, in fact, in constant suspension; we build pleasure domes around our fragile lives, surround ourselves with entertainment, culture and, ultimately, magic, in order to separate ourselves from the facts of our mortality: in order to untangle life and death and cloak ourselves in happy, carefree denial.

The works in this exhibition share with Coleridge’s poetry a common understanding of life’s closeness to death. Without
sacrificing this perception, both create, within their work, opportunities to actively suspend disbelief and enjoy life, away from death. However, we are always, whether in a poem by Coleridge or a painting by Semple, reminded of death’s presence and encouraged to remember it, briefly, before returning back into the dome.

“Suspension of disbelief doesn’t stop at entertainment. It extends to our whole lives, especially in the West. I think we’ve suspended disbelief in the fact that we’re all dying. That’s universal. We’re all mortal, but it’s not a bad thing. Only by acknowledging the inevitability of death are we able to truly live.”