The Meteorite Hunter by Alexandra Lethbridge is an archive of a search for meteorites and the places they come from.
The work is based on the impulse to search for the ‘other’ within the everyday. Using the notion of the Meteorite as a metaphor for the fantastical hidden with in the everyday, the body of work is a document of a hunt to locate the ethereal and sublime in the mundane and banal.
So often the familiar is overlooked in favour of the exotic as we crave to see and experience things that are strange and different to us. Sometimes the perception of something extraordinary or unusual lies within our control and the search for the otherworldly becomes an obsession where the reward is always out of reach.
The epitome of that is The Meteorite Hunter. Their job entails searching for a glimpse of a translunary guest, a clue to something that tells us more about who we are and where we come from.
As the hunter travels, so too does the Meteorite. In orbiting through space the rock exists as a Meteoroid. The journey becomes a signifier. Space; pointing to the ethereal and celestial and Earth; to the concrete and factual.
The Meteorite Hunter becomes the guide between these two realms, anticipating and calculating the arrival of these specimens. The hunt sees them sift and wade through our earthly rubble, constantly casting aside the fantastic objects that exist all around us in favour of the celestial and otherworldly. Soon the artifacts that are collected along the way begin to cluster and multiply until there exists a vast archive of forms acting as evidence.
Each of the collected artifacts is then presented in equal measure in the form of an archive, asking the viewer to consider the relationship between the different images and to encourage new readings on familiar objects. Playing on the ambiguity of the reality of the imagery, the work causes a disruption in our presumptions about what we see and a reconsideration of our everyday, effectively trying to create circumstances where the familiar appears unfamiliar.
Using these ideas, the work challenges our preconceptions of our surroundings and question the parallels between our own world and our imaginations.
One of these images is in fact a meteorite. Part of the work is the text sections, which reveal the source of the imagery and encourage participation in locating the actual meteorite in the work.
All images © Alexandra Lethbridge
