Granite rocks coated in an artificial desert varnish; creature-like contours creeping across an archival map of Aberdeenshire; a lonely computer asking you to journey through a text-based adventure game into ‘The Shadow Biosphere’ of the North east.

Through Smoke and Varnish is a speculative imagining of a hypothetical place. The work took the form of an immersive installation, combining elements of interactive fiction with natural and synthetic materials to explore shadow life and weird ecologies.

‘The Shadow Biosphere’ is a biosphere hypothesised to exist alongside our own, with a biochemistry so radically different that it is almost completely undetectable. For many years, the only potential candidate for this realm was the dark veneer of desert varnish - a matter typically found over rock faces in climates with extreme temperature fluctuations. With a history of debatable biological origins, desert varnish has been held up as a potential product of the shadow biosphere. The work imagines this matter as an access point to a shadowed world and questions how to map inaccessible / imagined places.