The Valley Low is an exploration of The Necropastoral, an aesthetic and theoretical lens which frames the contemporary world within understandings of, and encounters with, the ‘new nature’ of the hypermodern world. A nature in which human activity is inseparable from the whole, no longer cordoned off into its own conceptual realm. A nature which is dominated by the toxic, the dead, the dying and undying, the mutated and the viral.

The Necropastoral is very much gothic in its outlook, alternately reveling and languishing within imagery of war, death, corruption and the inhuman. But where the traditional gothic was concerned with using the uncanniness of the supernatural to explore the plainly natural, (both within and without humanity) the Necropastoral instead uses the very real state of nature under capitalism to confront humanity with itself. While both are interested in using disquiet and fear as tools of revelation, the Necropastoral has no need for ghosts or eldritch beings, finding toxic waste, unexploded mines, and digital dumping grounds more than adequate to haunt its viewers.

It is atemporal, non-linear and counter-rational. Not in an attempt to further obscure, but rather to strip away the already ingrained and self-professed ‘rational’ myth of a separation between humanity and its activities, and the wider natural order. It is a reminder that there is in fact only one world; and that under the current order it has become a world of death and dissolution.

The works which appear under this theme all in some way address death, corruption, toxicity, or the uncanniness of the contemporary world. They are also all lively, revelatory or lavishly excessive, just as much as they are mournful, or fearful, or haunting. Rather than seeking to further the divide between humanity and the new nature we have created, they are instead excursions into that world; encounters with what we have wrought, both good and ill. They dance (in one case quite literally) amongst the grave markers and weeds and toxic molds of the now, in the sickly twilight of our hypermodern age.