Lydia Hannah Debeer

Melting Mountains

Installation: video triptych with floor of papier machée salt and double stereo, 12 min. 2 sec.

Melting Mountains | 2023

In her quest for the liminal, Lydia Hannah Debeer shifts and slides videos until she obtains aural and moving collages, in which the spherical and emotional blend into a subtle wave that draws you in. She encounters the images around her, and chooses them intuitively. The artist patiently takes her time to create compositions that fall into place, following a suitable rhythm. Through her carefully balanced work, she blurs the boundaries between different media, locations, and timelines.

Debeer's recordings are often unplanned. Like an accidental passerby, she gathers images that cross her path and capture her heart in moments where an immediate experience prevails. She isn’t quite sure yet what the outcome of her shots will be, nor if they will ever find their place outside of the archive. The videos that materialise from these moments are not documentaries, but rather a sensory poetry born of real landscapes.

Melting Mountains (2023) arose from such a chance encounter in the Scottish Highlands. Enveloped by the serene, vast landscape, Debeer felt at home. It was a warm day, sunlit. The snow, which would otherwise cling to your feet, gradually dissipated under the touch of sunbeams. The evaporating snow is visible in the image as a vibration. Flowing streams gradually give rise to sound. The longer it persists, the louder it becomes. The melting was captured by the artist as she herself melted. In the local Celtic culture, there exists a notion of “thin places”, where the divide between the “other world” and ours is thinner than elsewhere. So thin it collapses. A place where the landscape is imbued with mystery. She encountered something here. This place hangs suspended between a porous connection and a solid surface.

Sound and voice flow through Debeer's viewing experience like intimate threads. Image and music are brought together as deliberately selected branches of driftwood; their interaction is simultaneously thoughtful and intuitive. This results in a remix of both media where each component opens up the other. Purposefully, Debeer provides us with visual material that surpasses the static. Through an intricate editing process of arranging and rearranging, zooming in and out, pasting and peeling, the landscape takes on a choppy digital quality. A translucent textured layer grows as a top coat of the picture plane, detaching the natural aesthetic.

Yasmin Van 'tveld