Hollow places are exit wounds.  Hollow places are where we find out what we are made of. 

I created Hollow Places as a site of exploration, a portal into worlds disordered by terrorism and political violence, into geographies inflamed by long held stories of grievance and terror and revenge, a place to deconstruct the machinery of harm and the blood lusts that fuel it. 

In violent places everything begins with a feeling. A feeling that catches fires and becomes words, stories, actions. Violence has its own stories that lie like submerged, fragmented pieces of broken glass shimmering deceptively and dangerously under the surface of our world. Terrorism and political violence rip open our cities and our communities, scavenging like vultures that reach into us and hollow us out, leaving scars so deep we cannot imagine we will ever be human again. This is our wound culture with its overhead lights and splatter codes, its  rooms lit by a single bulb casting long shadows on blood stained walls, its soulless loop of news headlines and soundbites, its grieving cities. 

To enter into the dark spaces of wound cultures and human violence demands more than cynical detachment and an observer’s neutrality. Robert Coles once wrote that he sought to “to blend poetic insight with craft and unite ultimately the rational and the intuitive, the aloof stance of the scholar with the passion and affection of the friend who cares and is moved”. Wound culture is in the broken concrete and smashed windows of war torn cities, in the geographies that are marked by mass graves, in the bullet holes and blood stained walls of ravaged churches, in the silence of death camps.  

And yet, all it takes is a single flame, a solitary note of music to puncture the darkness, to say yes monsters live here but so do poets. In hollow places, beauty drips in like cool water, like sweet honey and reminds us of other truths. Underground rivers carve pathways into rock and mountain. Languages on the edge of extinction slip into music and poetry. Artisans build musical instruments to encase hollow places, so the notes vibrate and amplify until, at last, we can hear music. 

Welcome to the hollow places, my friends. Travel well.