Riddle me: Alice Anderson, Tessa Farmer, Oona Grimes, Sophie Lascelles, Helen Marten, Patricia & Marie-France Martin,Sarah Woodfine

About

‘Now we have machines to do our dreaming for us. But within that ‘video gadgetry' might lie the source of a continuation, even a transformation, of storytelling and story performance. The human imagination is infinitely resilient…' Angela Carter ,1990 The artists showing in this exhibition investigate different aspects of storytelling, fantasy, identity and the tragi-comic sensibility of materials. The work creates relationships between innocence and violence, light and darkness. Alice Anderson's Insomnia is a filmic installation of a ‘Freudian Tale', inspired by situations and objects that recall her childhood and provoke violent emotions. ‘Under a seductive and smooth appearance, her images speak of the cruelty of family relations'1. Tessa Farmer's stop motion animation contains fairies fabricated from urban and rural flora and fauna. The fairies resemble apocalyptic beings, fragile-looking, half-human, half-insect. Farmer is a silent storyteller, a scribe of dreams and nightmares. Necropolis is Oona Grimes' map and mirror of the waking world, a theatre of sleep whilst her collaboration with Sophie Lascelles, Peril, plays like a terrifying melodrama where objects and buildings take on dread significance. Sophie Lascelles works sculpturally with projections. Images take on three dimensional qualities: moving over surfaces, into cracks; a blurred image on the wall comes fleetingly into focus, in a corner under the radiator, a women's shadow circles, silhouetted against the evening sky, a man digs; his garden or something more sinister? Patricia & Marie-France Martin's video ... Unseen by the gardener unfolds within a garden, cemetery, and church with a medieval tower. The archaeological site evokes a reflection on notions of identity and confinement, physical and mental. Hailing from a generation riffling continually on a fuzzy empire of images, atmospheres, excitements and densities, the work of Helen Marten is a crumple-zone of geometries and histories. A pulling apart and re-arranging of the high and low, the work forces a dialogue between content and structure- a move between a finger-tip relationship with materials and their symbolic potential. Sarah Woodfine explores imaginary worlds that border between the familiar and fantastical. Her drawings often take the form of three-dimensional constructions, exploring dreamlike imagery that is rooted in childhood yet easily causes tremor among adults'