Artists Jackson Whitefield, Youki Hirakawa, and Oliver Raymond Barker will be represented in a new exhibition, Strata, opening at Anima Mundi, St Ives, on Friday.
Cove Descending, by Jackson Whitefield
Each artist explores through the lens to examine the deep interrelation between the human body and the earth — how one navigates, shapes, measures, and remembers the other. The three exhibitions are designed unfold across the building’s floors like layers in the ground.
On the ground floor, St Ives-born Jackson Whitefield’s Datum translates movement through the landscape into sculptural and photographic form. Each step becomes a measure, each surface a register of contact. Through walking, climbing, and mapping, Whitefield explores how action and matter converge. His sculptural frames and dissected black-and-white prints hold the memory of terrain — not as representation, but as a physical record of experience.
Torso (detail), by Youki Hirakawa
On the middle floor, Youki Hirakawa’s Axis explores our layered relationship with nature. The double-sided video totem Torso presents the body of a climber shaped by rock, reversing the traditional creator–muse relationship in art. Shown alongside Coaled Sky and Tree and Two Stumps, these works move between destruction and renewal, reflecting on the tension between human intervention and the quiet persistence of the natural world.
Cove Forest, by Oliver Raymond Barker
On the top floor, Oliver Raymond Barker’s Trinity is a meditative journey into landscape and time. Made using a custom-built ‘backpack’ camera obscura, Barker’s large-format negatives are produced on site in remote locations. Centred on the Rosneath peninsula in Scotland — a place layered with histories of pilgrimage, protest, and control – Trinity entwines the elemental, the political, and the spiritual, reflecting on how land holds both conflict and sanctuary.
Strata launches on Friday evening (14th November), from 6.30-8.30pm. It runs until 10th January.
Anima Mundi | Street-an-Pol, St Ives TR26 2DS | animamundigallery.com/
