MIRREN KESSLING

Sham Ruins, Into A Dwelling

June 2025 

Last year I embarked on a new body of work, with the intention of exploring my connection to the land.

I wanted to excavate my memories of; communal ceremonies in nature, rituals to celebrate rites of passage, meditation walks in parks, pilgrimages to sacred sites. Fuelled by a longing I have for more expansive connections with others through communing with the natural world.  

For me, the act of organising events, of holding others in a communal act or experience, of being held in attending events and collective spaces is incredibly hopeful, spiritual even.

But as I started to attempt documenting these experiences in nature, I began to realise how much of the landscape was a fantasy. The images were not wild, but full of the artificial.

Clipped lawns, trimmed hedges, man-made hills, neat lines of trees, potholed footpaths, roots pushing up tarmac, fences and strange stone structures peeking out of copses.

I discovered a book “Monumental Follies: an exposition on the eccentric edifices of Britain”, 1972. It featured a lot of druid temples which had been created in the Victorian era to stimulate the sublime, places that felt familiar and distant at the same time.

I became fixated on these follies; ornamental towers, sham ruins, well houses and theatrical monuments built by landowners of the past. They mimic ancientness, gesturing towards the sacred.  

The persistent image of the lone tower caught my attention. Often seen as a place of perspective, solitude and revelation. The high tower is frequently visited in the climax of a story, the final threshold, the location of truth told through revelation.  

And if that’s the case, then why where were so many of these follies built without staircases or doors for entry?

Did any truth lie within? What was the revelation inside?

These towers weren’t meant to be entered. Built to be seen from below, to impose, to stage control/authority/dominion. They imply the sacred while holding it at a tantalising, unreachable distance. They declare ownership of land, history, knowledge.

Over time these follies fuse with the land, their presence mistaken for something ancient. But it is not a ruin of the past as such, it is a residue of fiction. And if the land is read through the act of viewing the tower, it tells a particular story of inheritance held tightly, of access denied.

The image of the folly twitched, an arm appeared reaching through a growing tear in paper window at the top of the tower. Figures from old paintings, architectural fragments and phrases from that strange book started finding their way towards each other. In a silent trance I watched as the images from old books began undoing themselves, unravelling to expose their inner seams and scaffolding, crawling inside and out of each other, knocking each other down and re-forming.

What does it mean to seek meaning, connection, or transcendence in a landscape already shaped by fantasy and exclusion?

What kind of spiritual inheritance is offered in a place where access to land, and by extension identity, is so often mediated through nostalgia and ownership?

The landscape I remembered felt more like a stage set, its spiritual historya construction, imagined and reimagined through centuries of longing and loss.

These towers struck me as fantasies authored by power, posing as tradition,surrounded by land long enclosed. No wonder so many were named sham ruins. Theyare symbols of a selective memory, the pretence of romanticism from anuntouchable overseer. A keeper of revelations withheld from the rest.

This became the path of the work: not to reject the sacred, but to probe the edifice of its ruin. To gaze at it’s structure and to let my mind slip like smoke into an uneasy dwelling, between  enchantment and delusion. The fabric of nostalgia cloaked as heritage decayed and rotted. The sham ruin birthing itself again and again and again.