Lady Be Good
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”H.P. Lovecraft
The second in the series ‘Prosthetic Mythologies’ is piece of work comprising a series of objects and accompanying text. The objects are talismans, imbued with power and charged by the imagination. They are dark objects in the desert, drifting solid and heavy and licked by the sparking tongues of the wind. Carved by the sting of sand.
It begins with the story of the missing B-24 plane ‘Lady Be Good’ which lost its way in a sandstorm in 1943. The crew was forced to bail out over the Sahara Desert. The plane and its crew were not found for another 16 years. The diaries of the crew perfectly preserved in the sands provide a ghostly account of their last agonising days walking across the merciless emptiness of the Saharan sand sea, Calanscio, in Libya. They had no hope of being rescued. The plane drifted silently on after the men bailed out, flying empty into the haze, lost to the crew that sought it and lost to many others who searched in vain. It existed only in the imagination, drifting in the desert.
