Our Infinite Day-trip

Our Infinite Day-trip maps a borderland between perceptions of urban space and the romanticised wild. In its first manifestation Our Infinite Day-trip was exhibited on a remote island off the west coast of Canada. The works temporarily installed on the island included ‘VIA (Vehicle of Infinite Arrival)’ - a 12 ft portable sculpture built of extreme condition tent technology, and a neon text providing a loose translation of the work’s title 'HIC MANEBIMVS OPTIME' - words attributed to Aeneas upon finding Italy (Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid).

These works explore what might be sought in such ‘untouched’ landscapes, and how the nomadic movement through them serves to sustain an ideology that is collective and yet transient. The ‘wild’ is a fictionalised modern day ideal, a fantasy conveniently tamed and packaged for pleasure, so how then to negotiate our pool of known images of the unknown? Edwards’ work is a knowing construction of sentimental scene-gazing and a persistent romantic yearn for an uncharted map or a lost traveler’s Moleskine. The fact that these works seem to acknowledge their own failure to embody the experience or value of the Sublime, paradoxically seems to move them closer to it. This is not achieved through the presence of knowing, but through a fragile wistfulness that still remains despite it.

In their exploration of the ambiguous relation of space to motion, and travel to destination, these works constitute a fragile and fluid landscape of their own.