In Greek mythology the three headed dog Cerberus stands at the threshold of the underworld. He keeps the living from entering and the dead from leaving. Nothing crosses his line. Cerberus has always struck me as a very human fantasy, like a 360-degree camera mounted on a pole, scanning for whatever escapes our field of view. We rely on sight to make sense of the world, and anything that happens outside it becomes a source of unease.

When I was a teenager, we used to have a dog who buried his stuff all around the garden and then forgot about it. Sometimes it found the things again after months or even years and dragged them into the house. Zombified squishy toys, moldy strips of buffalo skin, whatever had survived underground.

I’ve always been fond of Francis Bacon’s Man with Dog. The man is only present as a dark silhouette of legs, moving across the surface. For him the ground is a border, something to stay on top of. Whatever continues beneath it stays out of reach. The rest is the dog world. The dog is absorbed in it. The ground makes sense to it in ways we do not perceive.