Filo Ancantilado (The Fight), 2025
Filo Anacantilado (The Fight) is a joint performance made by Barnaby Wessell and Lucas Fernandez in Glasgow, May 2025. The fight between two strange creatures speaking in tounges rises in intensity and violence across 5 rounds until one of the two is slain. Surreal and entertaining the hope is the audience might eventually feel peturbed by what they witness and uncomfortable with the potential good humour they found in it previously. Made in response to the growing violence of ICE raids in Trump’s America it’s both spectacle and fear made from the distant, disconnected vantage point of scotland with one of the performers and artists never having even left europe at time of creation it naturally becomes a high fantasy as to what this is. Emulating the process we all go through processising the overwhelm of information and news we are fed/read - that is making up what the hell it means.
Cave studies, ongoing
(after le grotto and the left hand of darkness) , blue ink on paper, 2024
Crow, 2025
Wandering Studio, 2025
Modern Wayfaring, Ongoing
Modern wayfaring is sitting on the bus between London and Bristol on the way back from your visa appointment. The NX 040 and it’s 7 oclock so it’s full and your 6 pound 50 is seeming not so worth it stuck next to the nervous man in crisis, who smells quite a bit. You’d like to talk to him see if you can help but you know your stuck next to each other for the next 3 and a half or 4 hours so you don’t. Because awkward silence is better than the unkown conversation of those potential hours. You have the window seat so you look out of it - seeing the horizon distort and shift, prying itself from the curve of the earth falling to the side of the road - along the double yellow line. The only consistant monemuments in modern wafaring are not towers, hills or churchtowers but the faces of the other travellers stony and impassive beneath headphones and flickering phone light. The new landmarks perhaps more impassive and unmoving than the old. You dont meet people as a modern wayfarer.
Static Puppets, 2025
Static puppets made at moments of emotional intensity from the last year. Often they do the thing i find so enchanting about puppets - become vessells for the bits of me I’d rather keep separate or purge.
The Wanderer Dependant, Ongoing
Map of the ‘Wanderer Dependant’s’ route around the lake Bolsena, ink on paper, 2025 -->
Below drawings made during the walk of the ‘Wanderer Dependant’ from the campsite of the Fat Germans to Bolsena. \/
This was my first Journey as the ‘Wanderer Dependant’ who has lived in my head, somewhat unchanged since 2024. He’s a revolutionary: trespassing across land, ignoring private property - infringes upon our rights to roam. Yet he’s also trapped in the past, walking from one ancient monument to the next (iron age hillforts, the via francigena, stone circles, long barrows) attaching ritualistic importance to these sites and vainly trying to inflate his own meaning through association to such monuments. A speculative myth weaving he extends to each object or experience he finds on his travels (a traffic cone becomes a cylinder for captured souls, or a tractor a terrible monster). For me as the artist, he is an opportunity too to give in to the voices of the land around me. To perform him is a deep listening: to the road I’m on, the sights sounds and feelings that arise from the journey and then an attemot to embody these into the charachter I play. Doing this first performance in Italy where I was unable to speak the language, but on the familiar 900 year old Via Francigena Pilgramige route was an effective “in” because I had ritualistic purpose and history behind the path I walked alongside a poor understanding of the specific region leaving room for speculation while maintaining wieight of meaning behind it.