The Horsingdon Transmissions No.221: Stairway to the Abyss

As spaces of transition, stairways are also thresholds and boundary markers. They reaffirm the wider classificatory order and system of categorical distinctions, in part by reminding us of their own exclusion and anomalous status in relation to these orders: they are necessary partitions which reinforce the conceptual boundaries we purposely erect to hide the disarray of meaninglessness and the tumultous chaos which forms the ultimate lattice upon which reality is constructed. As such, stairways are uncertain and inchoate places and - as is the case with the above example, commissioned by James Boreham in the early 1900s, and which leads too-and-from nowhere -  are often haunted by the shifting forms of those indeterminate entities which inhabit the lawless Outside.