The Silver Vale is a place where mythology and personal identity merge, where landscape and fantasy dissolve into one another. The starting point for this new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Luke Edward Hall is the large painting There Was a Spirit Hidden in the Rustling Trees and the Grass Under his Feet, created in September 2024 – a vision of Pan, the Greek god of the wild, guiding a figure through a luminous, dreamlike forest. This moment of initiation, both intimate and ecstatic, became the catalyst for a series of paintings and drawings that explore queer identity through the lens of mythology and nature.
Hall’s paintings draw on the themes of E.M. Forster’s 1912 short story The Story of a Panic, in which the god Pan appears to a young outcast named Eustace, transforming him irrevocably. Forster’s tale has been interpreted as an allegory of queer awakening – an interpretation that resonates deeply with Hall. In his works, Pan is both seducer and liberator, leading figures away from the constraints of the ordinary world and toward an elevated, transcendent existence. But perhaps Pan is not external at all; perhaps he represents something internal, something essential to embracing one’s true self fully and without hesitation.