Mat Collishaw, Albion

Part of Mat Collishaw’s critically acclaimed exhibition The Centrifugal Soul, Albion is an installation that takes as its subject the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham. This centuries-old tree has at its core a hollow rotten trunk, and since the Victorian era its vast limbs have been supported by an elaborate system of scaffolding. Collishaw’s monumental, slowly rotating image of the oak is a ghost-like apparition generated by laser scanning. The image represents a living object that is trapped in perpetuity to present the illusion of life. ‘Collishaw’s great skill is to use one form of illusion to illustrate another. The optical kind draws out the psychological kind – something closer to delusion or disillusion. Of course his works look like ghosts: they are portraits of things that are latent in our minds, hovering until the right “philosophical apparatus” comes along and renders them apparent. The things we think we see, the things we think we want, the things we think are true about ourselves, th