GARY Winters and Claire Hind's contribution to the 2019 York Literature Festival is a typically experimental performance in the York Theatre Royal Studio tonight.

Premiered at the Defibrillator Gallery in Chicago, Lost In A Sea Of Glass And Tin is a mixed-media live work, encompassing light, sound, projection and voice, wherein the duo ask: "What does it mean to leave everything behind, to take off and live a life of solitude? Where can we go and what can we become?"

Winters, co-artistic director of performance company Lone Twin, and Hind, associate lecturer at York St John University with a PhD in performance practice from the University of Leeds, collaborate regularly on exhibitions, short films and live performance pieces for the city, studio, gallery and museum. Or in this instance for York's literature festival.

"We took a road trip from Chicago through Wisconsin to Mount Zion and into Iowa, following some of the route Alvin Straight took in David Lynch’s biographical road drama The Straight Story," says Claire, introducing Lost In A Sea Of Glass And Tin.

"We shot some film on this road trip before taking up residency at the Defibrillator Gallery, in Chicago, to make a new intermedial work with the intention that the film, as a visual score, was a prompt for us to write creative material and develop the structure of the performance."

Gary takes up the story: "We play with cross-fertilisations of art forms between Lynch’s noir-esque cinema and a distortion of gestures for the singing body once explored by medieval hermits and in solitude.

"We draw upon our own fascination and observations of a seaside entertainer on the North Yorkshire coast who, week in and week out, sings the classics and to his heart’s content, along with the energy and commitment of his super fans.

"We are mesmerised by Laurence Sterne’s concept of the black page, from the 18th century novel The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. Our practice aligns Sterne with Lynch as Lynch talks of the colour black in visual art and film.

"He says: 'Black has depth… you can go into it... And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream'."

Claire continues "We have brought many different experiences and worlds together to make this performance, and Lost In A Sea Of Glass And Tin, like Sterne's novel, delivers a series of digressions that lead to this simple question: What does it mean to leave everything we ever knew behind? Take off and live a life of solitude? Where can we go and what can we become?

Gary and Claire's artistic enterprises are influenced by conceptual fiction, cult cinema, dead icons, hermit culture and dark emotional ballads, and they have eight years of writing and producing collaborative arts events under their belts. "We work across live art, visual performance and film and make work for the gallery, the studio, the village green, the moors, the city and the coast," says Claire.

"We take our audiences on walks, make pop-up neon installations for the incidental audience and curate exhibitions that share the documentation of our practice as artefact," adds Gary.

Tickets for tonight's 7.45pm performance are on sale on 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.