Artist : Jim Carter
Title : The Ancients
Medium : wood, deer, sheep & badger bone, cow tooth, leaves, soil, agricultural waste, papier-mâché
Size : 12 x 40 / 12 x 55 cm


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“That the Earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness—this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. It meant that he lay so close to the Earth that he felt her pulses as his own. The idea stormed his belief.”

“Within some ancient fold of the Earth’s dream-consciousness they both lay caught. In some mighty Dream of her planetary Spirit, dim, immense, slow-moving, they played their parts of wonder. Already they lay close enough to share the currents of her subconscious activities. And the dream, as she turned in her vast, spatial sleep, was a dream of a time long gone.”

Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Centaur’

Jim Carter likes to tell animal stories through words, sculpture and ritual. Stories about wildland and wildlife and a deeper sense of their mystery, power and vulnerability in relation to humankind. Uneasy or tragic, irrational or obscure, his stories express a real world of suffering and transcendence: making sculpture from organic materials as a means to express advocacy, wonder or commemoration; shifting to the written word as a way to enter emotional and numinous spaces of memory and dream. Carter wants to be honest in negotiating the complex experiences that arise in relation to a time of climate emergency: there is anger, fear and sorrow, but also opportunities for magic, fertility and renewal.

Jim Carter was born in Worcestershire in 1967. He received an MA with distinction in Art and Environment from Falmouth University and an MSc Award in Ecopsychology, Centre For Human Ecology. Carter’s work has appeared in The Dark Mountain, About Place Journal, Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine.



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