Catling's Vorrh

Catling's "Vorrh" trilogy is a mezmerizing piece of fantasy fiction the current culture has recently witnessed since it challenges complicated maps and conventions that fantasy and non-fiction has presented to us throughout history.. It seems that in modern times, we have been restrained in our thinking  that fantasy might go only so far with an imagination before becoming increasingly acute and crossing over into something science fiction or at least inherit signifying attributes from the genre. Catling's methodology here though is suggesting to us that we can escape the confinements by integrating definable hints of each field through poetic verse, rather than to become too specific and too bogged down by a science fiction boxing of some sort, similar to how a sculptor combines fluent strokes with emotion while at the same time providing no theory in  how he/she is doing it. Catling's prose is informing his very own craft as a painter  and sculptor.

The Exploration of Vulnerability

https://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/catling/6-01_Brian_Catling_Vorrh-sm.jpg

By introducing familiar elements of fantasy fiction to an audience that has grown weary of them throughout the years, Catling testifies  the meat of it's physical properties. Critics say it fits into the "Mythic Fiction" category but this is perhaps a misconception if Catling's approach is focusing on a manipulation through sculpture. Muybridge as one of the story's main protgonist is helping us blend together his abstract conceptualization here because he acts as an inventer and pioneer of moving images. The story itself presents to modern culture a set of questions of, "who is the higher conciousness of all that exists?" and "what happens when the desire for survival is conflicted by the desire for power?". If the Vorrh is a mythical device that erases all memory, what physical chracteristics are used to construct for ourselves an "Adam and Eve", a "Cyclops", or an "Android"?

Exploration of Vulnerability

Catling's performance titled "Crutch"

Excerpt from Alan Moore's foreword:

"The quality of lithic stillness brought to his performances is sculptural, as too is the apparent working method which informs his poetry and prose: there is a sense of raw experiential elements crushed manually together into a new shape; of language worked between the fingers into different and surprising contours. This procedural approach is witnessed in The Stumbling Block’s successful crafting of a piece of mental furniture, or Bobby Awl’s stark evocation of the physical from a surviving cast of its historical protagonist’s tormented features."

 If cinema as a language captures moments of physical life, what do we need from animation as the current noblest art to flourish in a near future that is bent on something totally, completely augmented? Another point of emphasis that is simulated here to an advanced degree is optics in order for the readership to have different experiences between each transition.

Catling has chosen the Cyclops as his focal point, by having you rethink a chracter's sense of sight to experience the fictitious world around them, or if what their seeing is really true or not.