The Silent Village @ Ffotogallery, Turner House, Penarth

Peter Finnemore - from Everyday

In the summer of 1942, the Nazis massacred 170 people in the small Czech mining village of Lidice.

Within months, filmmaker Humphrey Jennings was already working on a project to re-stage and film the events of Lidice in the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd in the Swansea Valley.

Jennings used real residents of the village rather than actors in his portrayal. There was no attempt to pretend Cwmgiedd was Lidice. Rather the simple, effective dramatic conceit was that such events could happen anywhere, in any village.

Helpfully, the film in its entirety is shown in a gallery room and is a good place to start.

As propaganda, it did the job – free of any real violence and full of nice symbolic touches.

The faceless occupiers bark commands at the population of the “Protectorate of South Wales” from a black car with a monstrous loudspeaker on the roof .

For this exhibition, modern day artists have been asked to respond to the events of Lidice and Jennings’ film.

At first glance it seems a curious leap.

In comparison to the brutal power of the original film, some may find these contemporary responses a little slight. They are certainly very personal and unexpected.

Peter Finnemore presents a series of black and white images of empty domestic interiors.

He photographs the quiet corners and details of what seems to be a typical Welsh cottage.

The steep stairs, the tongue and groove doors, the faded floral wallpapers, the old radio with its evocative list of place name stations: Helsinki, Vienna, Munich.

Perhaps the emotional effect is as well-worn as the carpets he portrays, it signals absence.

But Finnemore’s images do echo the unadorned domestic aesthetics of the period the film was set in, the sheer normality of the surroundings.

Their power comes from the fact that we all know someone who probably lived in a cottage like this, it’s just around the corner of living memory.

His theme is picked up in a text by Rachel Tresize with a quote: “Things like work and life and soap were more important than second rate things like nationality and causes and war.”

The thought that the terrible events of Lidice could have happened in the surroundings of your grandmother’s house is unavoidable and powerful.

Paulo Ventura, the other artist featured, has employed his own fictional conceit, just as the film did.

He presents a series of photographs of German soldiers.

The fiction comes from an idea that these are actual found photographs, right down to the fake scratches and faked ageing.

But these images are not even real soldiers, they’re complete constructions using dolls and costumes.

We’re even shown the fake, aged envelope that they were supposedly found in.

Perhaps it’s meant to be Blair Witch-ian, but I couldn’t help thinking of the infamous faked Hitler diaries.

But to be fair, Ventura is not trying to pull the wool. His images offer you something the film does not – it reverses the process of dehumanising the villains.

While Jennings’ original film deliberately avoids creating any empathy to the Nazi guards of the Village, Ventura, in a controversial twist, could be hinting that in another set of circumstances, perhaps all of us have the potential to be the perpetrators of inhuman acts.

Paulo Ventura

(This review originally appeared in The Western Mail 05.02.10)

AUXESIS at TactileBOSCH, Llandaff

Johnathan Caswell - The Art of Persuasion

Auxesis is a hyperbolic term implying something appears greater than its actual size. So when tactileBOSCH describes this event as “an epic show” of experimental photography, video, film sound and live action, you’d almost expect it to be deliberately underwhelming – happily it isn’t.

In many ways, the industrial laundry building itself that houses the tactileBOSCH studios and exhibition space is the star – a layer cake of crumbling structure and flaking paint. On the night I visited, it was near to freezing outside and, if anything, it felt even colder in the building.

There’s a wide range of work on offer in this show from more than 20 artists working in lens-based media. With many pieces being site specific, the surroundings lend an urgent and eager atmosphere to a lot of it.

For this show, much of the space is dark, relying on the flickering light of projected images. Rooms are separated by curtains, and the layout of the building turns into a strange spiral, into some stygian, damp recesses, and not just of the building.

But this is all part of the fun as you happen upon little gems in hidden corners, such as Robert S Pugh’s collection of chattering, rattling old Super 8 film projectors. There’s a bit of a junk shop aesthetic to this installation.

The projectors stripped of their plastic outer casings are like skeletons with the guts of their hidden mechanisms on show. Film fragments, mostly on short loops, are projected around the room. A central image – some found footage of a rescue at sea – constantly plays back the 1,000-yard stare of a distressed seaman pulled from the water onto a life raft.

He’s at the edge of life, barely hanging on, like these fragile machines. Mechanical, but delicate, you wait for the thing to break down and collapse, but it rattles on in a determined, life affirming way.

Something similar is going on in Johnathan Caswell’s work, but more hi-tech. Caswell presents a series of gutted televisions suspended on cables from the ceiling.  Somewhere among the entrails of wires is a set of computers that process an image and send different versions of it to each screen.

It’s a neat twist in portraiture with each face being constantly updated and processed. It undermines the expectations of portraiture and it’s fun; in a cyber-junk, Blade Runner sort of way.

Curiously in the dank and gloomy surroundings, it was often the polished, hi-tech pieces that stood out. Perhaps the crumbling surroundings were acting as a foil. So it was that Mark Collins-Wren and Craig Thomas’ As Above-So Below proved quietly spectacular. A single figure, shot against a green screen and digitally duplicated, repeated and mirrored created an ethereal, hypnotic effect projected up onto the flaking ceiling.

Michail Iwanowski’s nocturnal portrait photographs provide a similar sleek and polished contrast. Using long exposures in darkened rooms, he moves around his subject – usually someone he knows intimately – just highlighting the areas he wants to be seen with a small neon torch while the subjects hold still, sometimes for up to five minutes.

The results have a wonderful, unreal and dreamlike quality. Expect to see hundreds of copycats once this technique leaks out onto the internet.

Michail Iwanowski

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 29.01.10)

Michail Iwanowski

Robert Greetham, St David’s Hall, Cardiff

Robert Greetham - Semana Santa

Robert Greetham has been making regular journeys to witness the religious festivals surrounding Semana Santa (Holy Week) in southern Spain since 2004.

His imagination was fired up when he first saw the work of Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero.

Semana Santa is a strange spectacle to British eyes; processions of devotees traverse the streets of towns like Malaga and Seville, carrying crosses, following floats that depict scenes from the Passion. The processions are accompanied by penitents in their distinctive cloaks and conical, pointed hoods that completely cover their faces.

At first sight it all feels very ominous but that’s possibly just the connotations that have developed since this particular type of costume was hijacked by the Ku Klux Klan. Semana Santa has nothing to do with race or supremacy.

The tall, pointed headgear and carried crosses are a gift for composition. Greetham captures them standing out starkly against the mellow ochre tones of the crumbling Spanish buildings. In fact, the cloaks are often so black that they have no detail, no light and shade. They become silhouettes, stark featureless avatars of the penitents. The anonymity of the participants, it transpires, is an essential part of this ritual.

Most of these images are details, close-ups. Greetham gets right in among his subject and we witness these events largely as a series of fragmentary objects, isolated moments or as a series of snatched faces in the crowd.

Greetham has an eye for the multi-layered reflections in things like shop windows that reveal glimpses of the procession juxtaposed against devotional objects on display behind glass.

Possibly the only wide view of the proceedings – and one of the most striking – is an image of a large TV screen mounted high on a building. It relays a wide view of the event from a video camera to the thousands of visitors that pour on to the streets. The contrast between ancient ritual and modern technology is both striking but fitting. There’s no separation, this is technology used in the service of the ritual.

I can’t think of any examples of religious fervour quite like this in Britain; where spirituality has become largely the domain of quiet personal refection, not to be discussed at the dinner table let alone paraded – literally – in public. Perhaps it’s something that’s unique to the Latin spirit. Spain is only a few hundred miles away, so how could such civic displays of devotion seem so strange, so alien?

Greetham has the eye of an outsider, the objective viewpoint of a foreigner in a strange land, but he’s never distanced – or distancing – from the subject.

At a time when so much modern photography opts for a self-aware and ironic standpoint – deliberately choosing not to engage but simply to document – Greetham’s work feels like it belongs to a different school.

It does engage, it gets in close, it refuses to take an ironic stance on a subject that could easily be mocked.

His pictures are about his commitment to returning again and again to uncover the layers of meaning in a complex event, driven by a fascination for a mysterious ritual that defies simple definition.

His approach is appropriately passionate; it’s a perfect fit for the subject.

Robert Greetham - Semana Santa

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 22.01.10)

Evelyn Williams and Dewi Tudur at Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff

Evelyn Williams - Strange Girl 1

AT first glance Evelyn Williams’ work seems like illustrations of a childlike dream.

But it’s not an upsetting dream or a nightmare – just one of those curious dreams that remain with you into the waking hours, where nothing quite drops into place and you can’t use logic to reason out the fragments.

Williams, who is now in her 80s, still turns out a large amount of work from her north London studio and she’s not afraid of scale either.

These are not timid pieces, but ambitious, large and stylistically wide ranging.

There’s often an immense amount of detail in her paintings, with backgrounds particularly highly worked.

For instance, in Early One Morning two figures venture out against a curious basket weave backdrop. Is it knitting, a detail from a whicker chair or a network of cables?

A similar approach is seen in Strange Girl where a serene renaissance female face – with an expression straight out of Pisanello or Piero della Francesca – is framed by a sea of wriggly pasta-like forms.

Evelyn Williams - The Ritual

In A Strange Place shows a couple in some quiet distress surrounded by strange semi-abstract, almost biological soup, as if they’re discussing their IVF treatment.

Williams’ juxtaposition of the figurative and the purely patterned takes a little getting used to, but once you’ve seen a few and you settle into her very personal way of seeing it, it all makes sense.

And then she changes gear and you have images like Night Crowd which are much darker. Once again it’s all in the detail as a sea of gloomy half-lit faces confronts you.

There are hundreds of them receding into the background. Each one is individual, each has a separate expression, each an illustration of some marginally different human emotion.

There’s no explanation of why they’re waiting, why they are here looking at you. They are Williams taking snapshots of what should be fleeting moments of subconscious thought, rendering them real, giving them a permanence and clarity.

In contrast, Dewi Tudur’s work is on display upstairs.

His relatively slow output makes this a rare event.

Working with landscape he creates highly stylised visions of North Wales, Pembrokeshire and Italy.

Tudur’s style is distinctive, but something about it brings to mind book illustrations from the ’50s. While some people’s individual styles need to soak into your head for a while, Tudur’s seem accessible.

He’s developed a personal shorthand for the elements in his mixed media pieces based around an almost calligraphic drawing style. His trees are elongated, his buildings often lean cartoonishly into the prevailing wind.

What he does have is a great sense of composition.

Both the paintings and line drawings – which I preferred – have an appealing, wiry tightness about them.

His colours – particularly the darker pictures – are very well handled, often feeling like night images in which a central point of interest has been lit up by a flash of localised lightning.

Pools of bright coloured detail sit in dark, moody blues and purples. Tudur is great at light, though his approach is non-realistic; like his drawing, it is highly dramatic.

Dewi Tudur - Carn Llidi, Sir Benfro (Carn Llidi, Pembrokeshire)

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 15.01.10)

Alan Phelan “Fragile Absolutes” at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff

Alan Phelan - Death Drive (interrupt the circular logic of re-establishing balance because he is the lowest outcast), 2009

With much of Alan Phelan’s new work, trying too hard to identify a logical narrative between the pieces on show – or indeed within each piece individually – is going to prove fruitless.

He’s often deliberately contradictory. A lot of the work shown as part of Fragile Absolutes has multiple cultural references and meanings, almost to the point of defying description.

While this can be frustrating for some, for others it’s the vagueness and spread of these connections that is going to prove engaging.

Equally diverse are the topics covered; modern obsessions like boy racers, and global economics rub shoulders with recent history, particularly that of Phelan’s native Ireland.

For instance, a pair of clubbed seals are created from papier-mâché. Phelan often uses photographs as starting points for three dimensional work and in this case it’s a reference to a press picture of the famous Canada House protests against the seal culls of Newfoundland. But the paper these tragic – and childlike – seals have been made from is taken from the Wall Street Journal and contains the names of many of the now defunct companies who came to public attention as “victims” of the recent recession.

More papier-mâché is used in the creation of a bust of Irish revolutionary Éamon de Valera. A one time co-owner of the Irish Press, de Valera – again rendered in newspaper – became notorious for his support for religious and social conservatism. Phelan’s sculpture depicts him with a curious, long snake-like tongue.

In one room, neat rows of cabbages are arranged in an enigmatic pathway. Cabbages are a humble vegetable and a staple in many parts of Eastern Europe but Phelan’s cabbages are made – once again – from newspapers, created during a workshop held here at Chapter. But, of course, these aren’t random newspapers but reprints of pages from Dublin papers dating from the early days of the Irish uprising.

Once again, the references – often driven by convoluted titles – are multi-layered but the harder you try to pin down the logic the further it twists away, just out of reach.

Another room is filled with large images grabbed from the TV series World War 1 in Colour. Each has a subtitle taken from the original programme. These images detail the events that led to the outbreak of the war. We’re so used to seeing this period in history in emotionally-distancing black and white that its presentation in colour, and arranged like banks of television monitors in a newsroom, suddenly brings it forward in time and prompts parallels with contemporary conflicts.

Anyone looking for neat solutions to Phelan’s enigmatic riddles will be disappointed. These are not crossword puzzles to be deciphered but jumping off points for sometimes complex, sometimes subtle, connections.

What’s really refreshing about Phelan’s diverse work is his refusal to get bogged down in any artistic tradition. Like many artists today he’s almost self-consciously working to avoid classification, working across a broad range of styles and materials. The result is some genuinely engaging and original work.

Alan Phelan - Cabbage

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 08.01.10)

Harry Hammond, at the Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff

Harry Hammond - Eddie Cochrane

Being in the right place at the right time is the key to memorable photographs, not just for single images but for whole bodies of work.

Harry Hammond – a one-time society photographer who realised, ahead of the curve, that showbiz was the new aristocracy – found himself perfectly placed to document the heady days of the birth of the British rock ’n’ roll scene.

This exhibition, from the V&A theatre collection, brings together a range of images that capture the sharp-suited, slicked-back hair and hoop-skirted innocent days of the late ’50s and early ’60s when the British entertainment industry was reacting to the sea change in popular music.

This was an age when TV began to shape the careers of entertainers more than live performances and Hammond often worked on the sets of early rock shows like Oh Boy and Six Five Special.

The TV studio, with its dark backgrounds and single spotlights, couldn’t help but lend these pictures a style that harks back to the days of American jazz photography.

Off stage, his portraits of the stars feel a little more stilted and awkward, but we can’t be hard on Hammond, who passed away last February, as it was the fashion of the day.

What comes across from these pictures is just how clean cut and innocent the early days of rock ’n’ roll were. The suits, the glitter and the smiles feel more an extension of the variety circuit – which arguably it was – than a great musical revolution. There is little indication here of the harder, more cynical attitudes that dominated rock photography in later decades.

One shot of Cliff Richard posing proudly next to his first car, a Sunbeam Alpine, feels like an intimate family snap. The backdrop of neat little rows of suburban bungalows effectively sucks out all the glamour. We were happy for our stars to be the kid next door back then.

The same is true of a picture of Lonnie Donegan, with his family outside his new house – a brand spanking new modern detached. It feels like another world. It was 1957, we never had it so good and the country was full of hope.

But there are darker clouds forming. One image of Eddie Cochrane on stage breaks the mould of sparkly-toothed, groomed innocence. Grainy and blurred, it feels snatched, rough and unposed.

The Settlers – a folk group – are snapped leaning self consciously against a tree, trying hard to look serious.

Arthur Brown and his band are posed in a wood holding their incongruous instruments, scowling their studied “please take us seriously” frowns.

These are three pictures prescient of a style that was to dominate in later years.

But perhaps most telling for me was a picture that contained no people at all.

It’s a view of the inside of a London ticket office from the ’50s, its walls plastered with posters and bills for upcoming performances. It’s a fragile time capsule and it’s not the big names on the posters that draw you in – it’s those who have since disappeared. Whatever happened to The Five Katanyas, Albert and Les Ward or Shani Wallis?

It’s this image, of the once famous, but now forgotten, rather than the well known faces, that reminds us how photography perfectly freezes the transience of time and fame.

Harry Hammond - Shirley Bassey (V&A Collection)

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 01.01.10)

Ian Phillips at Cynon Valley Museum, Aberdare

Pont Rhyd-Goch over Nant Cym Llwch

If you’ve ever had the curious pleasure of a chicken tikka pizza, you’ll know that bringing together two cultures is not always a recipe for success.

Ian Phillips works in reduction lino printing, inspired by the great Japanese tradition of woodblock printmakers, but applies this technique to the familiar landscape of Wales.

This could be asking for trouble – either the two traditions would grate incongruously or one would simply overwhelm the other. Just as likely is the possibility that the whole thing comes across as a gimmick.

Happily none of this is true and Phillips has managed to pull off a delicate balancing act and create an intriguing fusion in the process.

Creating light and shade using this particular technique is a real challenge, because the artist only has flat planes and blocks of colour to juggle with.

In reduction lino printing, the block is cut away, inked up and printed, cut some more and then reprinted with each subsequent layer getting darker.

The smudgy, indiscernible nature of paint lends itself to natural light effects – paint is good for vagueness – but linocut prints don’t offer that luxury. The work has to be precise, accurate and largely pre-planned. There is little room for manoeuvre, correction or perhaps spontaneity.

Capturing the subtlety or tempestuousness of natural light should be difficult in such a disciplined technique, but Phillips masters it, whether in the wild clouds and weather of Rain Over Cym Llwch or in gentle light breaking through clouds and hitting the sea in Ramsey Sound.

Much of this work covers landscapes and scenes we’ve seen before – generic Welsh views – but at other times they feel more Japanese, such as the near symmetry of Autumn Oak or in Pont Rhyd-Goch over Nant Cym Llwch, in which a tumbling torrent of a waterfall nearly fills the frame in a way that can’t avoid calling to mind the great waves of Hokusai.

And while we don’t have the iconic outline of Mount Fuji, Phillips gives us the distinctly recognisable geographical features of our own landmarks in images such as Clouds Over Pen Milan.

Happily, Phillips doesn’t just limit himself to pastoral scenes.

My favourite piece is a view of a block of modern flats in Llandaff, Cardiff. It’s a simple and unusual composition that balances the foreground of a sinuous, gnarled, twisted tree trunk against the geometry of modern architecture.

The colours – never more than three or four per image – are pared down to soft grey shades.

I wasn’t convinced at first where these soft tones have originated from, but on the drive back through the Cynon Valley it was all there, in the gentle purples and grey greens of the hills and forests.

And that’s when you know you’ve seen something good – one of those rare times when a body of work offers a new twist on old themes, making you look with fresh eyes at something you see every day, but somehow had failed to notice.

North Llandaff

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail – 18.12.09)

Picasso “Still Life with Poron” at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Still Life With Poron - Picasso

Purchased by the National Museum through the Derek Williams Trust and supported by The Art Fund, Picasso’s Still Life With Poron is the first oil painting by the artist to enter a Welsh public collection.

Whisper it, but £1.5m might be a lot of money for a middling mid-period Picasso with a lop-sided lobster and slightly dull colours.

Perhaps this is all really about politics and pride.

Whilst it’s possible for a provincial British city to get away with not having a “real” Picasso, a National Gallery should really have at least one.

Unfortunately the painting itself is a little disappointing.

My acid test is whether the experience of being in front of the work, on the wall, differs substantially from seeing it in reproduction. And in the case of the Poron, I’m not sure it does.

In 1948, with his great earth-shaking discoveries behind him Picasso was – let’s be generous – going through a period of consolidation.

Or, less charitably, it’s one of those pictures where the artist is almost parodying his own style. The standard riffs are all there; the flattened, twisted perspective, the simplification of forms.

But even the signature fails to impress – once it found its way to the back of a people carrier ferrying screaming kids on the school run it was always going to lose its lustre.

And don’t get me started on the questionable frame with its chintzy leaf patterns!

So, now we’ve got that bit out of the way, let’s get down to what’s important: namely context. And this is where the National Museum has provided a revelation.

The Picasso is displayed with a number of other mainly middle 20th century paintings, and a much earlier Cézanne, in a show the national gallery is calling Tradition Transformed.

This small collection shows us how dominant Picasso’s influence was back then and how his style permeated absolutely everything.

To the left we have a William Scott – a still life of a candle and a couple of playing cards – and a Ceri Richards, a sloppy but sensual rendition of a woman at a twisted piano.

But let’s be blunt, time hasn’t done either any favours. The Scott particularly looks like someone’s bad pastiche of cubism.

But here’s the curious thing. Images like these would once have been cutting edge – even shocking – but their power has been completely sucked away by the passage of time.

Today, they simply look sort of retro modern or perhaps classic modern or, to hell with it, just plain old fashioned.

Which is a curious thing to say about Modern Art.

A lot of this has to be put down to the way they rely so much on stylistic clues from the great man.

Even the likes of Graham Sutherland couldn’t resist the pull. A visit to see the master around this time resulted in him trying to Picasso-up his own work too.

But the real surprise is how well the Cézanne stands up next to the others. This still life of oranges resting on a cloth over a table with a blank wall behind has such weight and authority when placed alongside the others.

Cézanne is possibly the only other artist, putting aside Duchamp, who can claim to have influenced art as much as Picasso.

But what is startling is just how much more modern the Cézanne looks compared with the others, even though it pre-dates them by some half a century.

History is a cruel process of filtering and fashion, and alongside his monumental solidity the other pictures here, including the Picasso, are starting to look a bit like outdated, and simplistic, stylistic noodling.

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 04.12.09)

Kim Fielding “Sidewinder” at Oriel Canfas, Cardiff

As one of the key players behind the Llandaff based artists’ resource TactileBosch, Kim Fielding has been playing a pivotal role in the development of the Cardiff contemporary art scene for many years. This solo exhibition, Sidewinder, was inspired by the snake of the same name – you know the one that ripples effortlessly across desert sand leaving only strange curved indentations of its progress.

Although there are no appearances here of the eponymous serpent, Fielding seems fascinated by the idea of the Sidewinder as one of nature’s immaculate machines. There is something about the idea of a mechanically perfect device – usually predatory – that can operate without rationality that must lie at the root of many a nightmare.  Fielding explores this fear/fascination in a series of projected video pieces of male nudes and some uncanny macro close ups of sand and crabs.

Anyone who has ever gone exploring through rock pools knows that Crabs are creepy little monsters in miniature. Alternately fascinating or frightening. Fielding photographs them in extreme close up. At these distances – a fraction of an inch – only a small part of the image can be in focus with the rest blending away to a fuzzy dream, a blurry lair in which the oversized monster dwells.

In other pictures he photographs oily ripples in the sand or in the dark corners of rock pools and then, by the disarmingly simple process of duplicating and inverting the image (left to right) he creates a shocking geometrical perfection out of nature’s random sludge.

The rest of the space is given over to a number of video pieces which are projected variously against the walls or through net curtains. Some of these are large, taking up the whole height of the gallery whilst others are small with the projector aimed into a small corner of the room and one is in a cupboard under the stairs in a space barely large enough for one viewer at a time.

Most of the video pieces are essentially depictions of male nudes, swaying, writhing, twisting in movements that allude back to the idea of nature’s perfect machine. These bodies, all male, mostly young, are lit simply and processed mainly using slow motion or repeated, ghosted frames. In one a blindfolded boy fumbles around a room trying to find his own shadows on the walls and in another – under the stairs – a young man disrobes slowly whilst rolling on the floor covered in water or perhaps it’s oil. It’s an unusual image of masculinity. It avoids the usual hunky well-hung clichés of male nudes and reaches for a more sensual, willowy portrayal.

The real stand-out piece was a video called simply Crab which uses the talents of physical theatre actor Jaakko Tenhunen. In a genuinely freakish piece, Jaakko contorts his body and scuttles around sideway on all fours through the dark haunted-house corridors of TactileBosch’s old studio complex. It’s perhaps too much to call it shocking or disturbing but in an age of CGI monsters there is something brilliantly grotesque about these half human-half insect creatures achieved not through clever electronics but purely through the use of the amazing physicality of the actor and simple, low tech lighting.

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 27.11.09)

Embodiment, Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre, Cwmbran

Hannah - Claire Heathcote

Some of the most interesting new work being shown in Wales at the moment takes traditional craft aesthetics and pushes them into what would have been the realm of fine art. Embodiment – curated and shown by Llantarnam Grange – reveals the recent output of six artists who are working with textiles to interpret the human form in new ways.

Audrey Walker – one of the more established artists here – uses machine embroidery in a way that almost mimics brushwork. Her colours flow around her forms with energy and movement. Something about her work evokes church parade banners, perhaps it’s the subdued palette. Her Adam and Eve calls up Blake but filters it through the colours of ancient faded tapestries. Interestingly, from three paces away, her work could easily mistaken for painting, it’s not until you get in close that you get the full impact of the technique, it’s a real surprise.

Claire Heathcote’s Aldeburgh Afternoon is similar in the sense that from a distance it resembles a scratchy pen drawn version of a photograph. But where Walker’s surfaces are dense and tightly packed Heathcote leaves lots of raw canvas background. It’s an impressively economic style and there’s real personality in the eyes of the subject.

Rosie James uses a comparable technique. Her work has that illustrator’s style of defining a form by a single unbroken line. In Waiting for Monet a queue of people look like they’ve been rendered in energetic pencil but then you realise the lines are drawn by sewn threads, their loose ends left hanging rather than cut. These spare threads give the piece a ragged and slightly windswept feel. They add energy and randomness to what might be an over-neat piece.

Similarly, Claire Coles’ sumptuous and feminine constructions of wallpaper cut-outs, enhanced with stitched dreamy faces, are pure decoration. They have a swishy decadence that is reminiscent of Beardsley.

Naori Priestly - Shadow of the Mother

But for me, it’s in the three dimensional work that this show gets really interesting. Julie Arkell’s A Light Step is a small human child-like figure made from an odd mix of papier mache and kitted body parts. It’s an endearingly morose little puppet, resembling a character from the kind of dark East European animated film that scared and fascinated me as a child.

Naori Priestly makes similar small scale sculptures from crochet. It’s an aesthetic that immediately calls to mind baby clothes or soft toys and she plays it for all it’s poetic worth. In a tiny piece Hug Me she gives us a delicate, reclining crochet figure wrapped up in a knot as if trying to embrace itself.

In Two Different Kinds of Woman she offers a pair of characters, one brazen and leggy and the other pink and – literally – woolly headed, locked up together in a gilded bird cage.

But her stand-out piece, and for me the most intriguing of this show, is Shadow of the Mother. A pair of doll’s legs hang from beneath an oversized and overwhelming black jumper that engulfs the figure, head and all and, like a voodoo doll, there is a red topped pin stuck right where the heart might be. Christmas jumpers from your mother may never be the same again.

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 20-11-09)