Lilith May Peters

The Tale of Legday

2.10.-18.10.2025

2.10.2025, 5-9pm

Shovel in hand, resting for a moment. Occasionally others ask whether the tools are weapons, a thought that hadn’t even occurred. They are tools, meant to shovel away the rocks, to tend to the land, to change the shape of things. The landscape being worked on is far removed from questions like this. It stretches in all directions, a vast desert of heat and stone and sand not yet moulded into form.

Gardens are to be grown here and many new kinds of plants have sprung up so that it has become overgrown and wild. T ool in hand, the work begins. The task is sweaty and strenuous but liberating, each tool employed with practiced care. There is some order to be made of the wildness, and the garden, if it is to come, must emerge slowly. Strong legs rooted in the earth, arms overhead, they pull and tug at the plants with the full force of the body. There will be time later, for trimming and for a vision. But for now, only the physical act matters. To get lost in it, to gather strength from it.

 

On some days, they walk in the loveliness they made². Lie down in the tall grass, under mountains or by the sea. Stretch under fantastical backgrounds. Lunge, strike a pose, test their form. On other days, the cosmos recedes, leaving only a dim, enclosed room where a gaze awaits. What a garish experience! A historical annoyance that returns again and again in various mutations. A strange look crosses the face — quizzical, a little embarrassed maybe. Sitting awkwardly, as if posed for a yearbook photo.

 

Under someone else’s eyes, it becomes unclear how to sit, how to hold the body. And yet it is so familiar, to be in this position and not the other. T o be among the observed, unable to steer or shape interpretation. But perhaps the world is much bigger than moments like these. At times it folds in on itself, infinitely confined, but every now and then the sky bursts into red, the mountains light up and chasms open that let the light spill in, exchanging the many realities of little worth for rays of boundless grandeur²

Text by Sophie Cassel

 

1 Vita Sackville-West
2 Mary Shelley