Exhibition Review

David Cotterrell - Monsters of the Id

War, has happened for generations, throughout cultures. It scares landscapes, tares’ countries apart and changes lives. 

David Cotterrel's Monsters of the Id is a body of work that spans a two year period. Cotterrell worked in Afghanistan in the Helmand Province. The images that were taken over the first year were taken from the confines of the military bases and armoured Jeeps, however he was unable to see how the landscape was being changed by man, and only seeing the land through the eyes of the soldiers. On revising Cotterrell was able to leave some of the compounds and photographed the landscape and how such actions of man were changing the land.   

Monsters of the Id. The title for this body of work. The idea of a monster is something that you would expect to come from the imagination of a child, a dark creature with an ominous face. However the Id is something much deeper. The idea of the Id is the part of your subconscious that stimulates cravings, these cravings being the impulses to survive. The id controls our needs; if we become hungry we eat.

What is interesting about this work is that in some ways you could see this idea of war as the dark side of man's mind, man controlling his primal needs to kill, this being where the monster of the Id comes from. 

Image two is a shot from the second room of the exhibition, the sculpture in the centre of the room is made to represent a section of the landscape that you see in the main entrance of the building (Room 1). This section of the landscape has live images of the viewers in room 1 projected onto the sculpture in room 2, from this you could say that we are tiny in existence, that   really we are like ants. Moreover you could see this as how we as people change the landscape, while viewing the projections of people onto the sculpture it became apparent that some of the people travelled in groups while others were alone. In a sense this indicated that we travel the land and make changes to it as individuals or as social groups. 

In conclusion to this the exhibition looks at a number of different aspects of how people and events change and shape the landscape that we live in, as well as the idea that even though we might not witness war on a daily basis we cannot say that it does not affect us in some way, even if it is not direct.

http://www.cotterrell.com/
http://www.hansardgallery.org.uk/exhibition/current.html