The Bio-Pilgrymme, Part I: The Daerwynne Palimpsest and Lost Mechanicvm

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The Bio-Pilgrymme...

The God Emperor...

The Green Man Cometh!

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On January 1st 2016 a massive undertaking was launched over at Iron Sleet:

The Pilgrym...

A collaborative exploration of Terra itself in which I take part with a host of Lost Mechanicvm and a team of Bio-Explorers...

First up from me is the Arch Magos Biologis Sverre Arrhernius - the Bio-Pilgrymme - and a small handful of his most loyal Sicarian Thorn Guards! 

Arch Magos Biologis Sverre Arrhenius

To get the full story behind the Lost Mechanicvm, Crataegus Fragmentum, The Prigorian Divide (known simply as the The Rift), Rogue Traders, Brostten Haggwers and the Daerwynne Palimpsest I urge you to visit Iron Sleet (via the links above). Make sure to check back often and see all the other madness going on there during the spring and summer of 2016.

Here I will just quickly add to what is being said on Iron Sleet that my work on the Lost Mechanicvm is a thorough exploration of 'uncanny doublings and weird morphologies' in the weathered worlds of 40K in the 42nd Millennium. 

Close to my muse: 

Inspired by my work on forests at AAA, forest myths, Johns wickedly fine Voodoo-stuff, an incredible sketch by the ever talented Jakob Rune Nielsen (watch this space!!), Johan Egerkrans idea of Thorn Moons, holloways and a lot more! 

Next up are wips of a special pair of Lost Mechanicvm and the first few of Brostten Haggwers Bio-Explorers!

Melancholia III: Metamorphosis

Just to sum up:

The idea for Melancholia III was sparked while reading Dan Abnett’s brilliant Pariah a year ago. During the same period I read Robert MacFarlane’s eloquent Holloway. Two completely different but highly recommendable books: one set in the grim darkness of the future, another grounded in a profound knowledge of past and present landscapes of pilgrimage.

What these two books have in common are their descriptions of how some pathways, whether it being the harrowed streets of Queen Mab or the century old holloways of central Britain, are linear only in a simple sense. The latter is rather, maybe more than anything, wooden enclosures shaped by man over centuries in which rifts in time and space lead to ‘weird morphologies and uncanny doublings.’ (MacFarlane, 2012)

Treeman, Fighting Fantasy, John Blanche

 

This is a relationship Robert Pogue Harrison beautifully elaborates in his Forests – the Shadow of Civilization (1992) in which he unfolds how forests have played a major role throughout history in shaping us – as much as we have shaped them. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the goddess Artemis transforms Actaeon into a stag while he is hunting in the forest transforming him into the hunted, to Michelangelo Frammartino’s amazingly beautiful and highly recommendable cinematographic work Alberi, a visual tour de force of sight and sound depicting a strange annual tradition in Southern Italy of celebrating ’tree men’ of a local forest, it is, fundamentally, a relationship of change and transformation.

Treeman, Alberi, Michelangelo Frammartino

 Treeman (detail), Alberi, Michelangelo Frammartino

Recently Melancholia III has in itself changed and transformed into a project of another scale and timespan including collaborative terrain building with an old friend and a pilgrimage to the heart of the Imperium. Both share the same DNA drawn from this relationship and the plethora of ‘weird morphologies and uncanny doublings’ that have emerged from it. 

In short, it has turned into a pilgrimage in itself fuelled by a profound fascination of the weathered worlds of the 41^st and 42^nd Millennium and humanity’s relationship with the concept of ‘nature’ in a galaxy of untold worlds torn by war and strife.

Happy New Year – and watch this space!