£1,800.00
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Gareth McConnell’s psychedelic Icelandic horse photographs crack open the traditional image of the horse—majestic, controlled, subservient—and rewire it into something more cosmic, more electric. Bathed in hallucinatory hues, his horses seem to flicker between worlds, existing somewhere between dream and hyper-reality, between the ancient and the digital age. Their glowing manes and spectral eyes pulse with a strange sentience, as if they’ve galloped straight out of a vision or a fever dream.
In art history, the horse is a shifting symbol: from the noble war steeds of Renaissance paintings to the color-charged emotional intensity of Franz Marc’s Blue Horse. Marc, a founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that color could transcend its visual properties to communicate deeper emotional and spiritual truths. In his color theory, Marc assigned distinct emotional qualities to different colors—blue representing the spiritual and the divine, yellow the playful and the joyful, and red symbolizing the violent and the earthly. This use of color in Marc’s work provides an important parallel to McConnell’s psychedelic horses, where bright, neon hues create a sense of hyperreality, transforming the horses from earthly creatures into symbolic vessels of chaos and freedom.
Edwin Muir’s poem The Horses reimagines them as eerie, almost supernatural survivors of an apocalyptic silence—ancient forces returning to a world that has destroyed itself. McConnell’s horses echo this eerie return, vibrating with the kind of strange, prophetic energy that suggests they know something we don’t.
Then there’s the myth of Nietzsche’s Turin horse, as told by Milan Kundera—a moment of tragic poetry in which the philosopher, upon witnessing a beaten carriage horse, collapses in grief, embracing the animal before descending into madness. It’s a fable of human fragility, of the unbearable weight of witnessing suffering. McConnell himself has said he sees horses as “a symbol of chaos, freedom, and something unknowable and unpredictable at the edge of consciousness.” His images bring that vision to life, transforming these creatures into luminous, almost digital entities. They aren’t just captured; they seem to stare back, dissolving the boundary between human and animal, dream and waking, past and future.
The setting of Iceland adds yet another layer of mysticism and isolation to McConnell’s horses. The raw, volcanic landscape of the island, with its otherworldly terrain and stark beauty, creates an almost spiritual backdrop that seems to charge these creatures with an energy that is both ancient and futuristic. Iceland’s geographic remoteness has long been a place of myth and legend, and in some ways, McConnell’s horses are part of that narrative—a link between the primal forces of nature and the unknown.
This connection to the mystical is further amplified by the influence of Bill Drummond’s theory of interstellar ley lines—those invisible currents of energy that supposedly run through the Earth’s surface, linking sacred sites and cosmic forces. Drummond, in his exploration of these lines, suggests that certain places on Earth, like Iceland, resonate with a unique energy that can influence both physical and spiritual realms. McConnell’s horses seem to exist in that space where ley lines intersect, embodying the energy of the land itself—chaotic, mysterious, and full of potential. His horses are more than just animals; they are symbols of a greater cosmic order, a connection between the earth, the stars, and the human consciousness.
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‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'
Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine.
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