At the far end of the long skylight attic space is a huge, wooden ladder propped up against the wall. Its dimensions reduce me to a child as I climb up into a kind of hidey-hole. Up here its dark and small, an attic within an attic, tucked up under the eaves. With my back to the outside world, I look into a space that cannot be entered. Through a chicken wire fence I see in the dimness a wooden bed with slats missing, tangles of electrical wire, defunct machinery, cardboard and paper (pages from a sketchbook?) empty drawers, a dead plant. I hear the distant clamour below and I feel removed, contained in this little world. This relationship is echoed by a miniature metal hut on a mound of soil, beneath the dingy light of a bare bulb that hangs like a bleak sun. The little house is protected by a crude stick fence, which looms over it threateningly. An imaginary world created amongst the debris, its constructed-ness and theatricality separates it from everything else around. It seems to belong to another world again.

As an attic, the work speaks of the house / home. An attic is the place of both discarded things and of treasures put safe, a refuge for our memories, the place of secret adventures and discovery, lost hours, a hiding place, the function of shelter for dreams to all those places of retreat. Bachelard says that the house we are born in is engraved within us. "We would find our way in the dark of the distant attic. There exists for us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past." While the attic’s proximity to the roof suggests shelter and protection, the atmosphere here is one of containment, disconcertingly paired with the world of childhood. It seems to communicate the fear and vulnerability a child might feel when confronted with a larger world, a world it may seek to hide from, and this larger world may be simply the rest of the house. Drawing again from Bachelard, one may also read the house as a metaphor for the unconscious, and in this work this deep place of the past within oneself is guarded to the point of imprisonment. The ladder, as an optimistic symbol of ascension, doesn’t prepare one for what one finds at its top - the iconography and objects of home and childhood, yet a place entirely without solace.

These themes can also be found in the performance work of Eve Dent. Dent installs her own body, hiding herself in the very fabric of buildings, going between the walls like a ghost, hovering between the spaces of the real and some other world that lies just behind it. Her work also seems to speak of childhood – the delight in cramming oneself into spaces, of games of hide and seek. Hers is a sensuous and formal exploration – the curves of the body against the geometry of architecture, the colour and texture of the flesh made more explicit and vulnerable against the roughness of bricks. Within the context of the Glassworks show, Dent’s work was the antithesis of the exhibitionism / voyeuristic spectacle of the other performance works. It was more subtle - a silent intervention, allowing the unexpected viewer the uncanny chance discovery of a naked body crouched in a hole in the wall. Beautiful and alarming, like a Spencer Tunick photograph, (an image of hundreds of naked bodies lying in a street in the centre of some city - is it decadence or desolation? an orgy or a holocaust?) Dent’s work similarly inhabits the rich territory of uncertainty, of uncomfortable ambiguity - of playfulness and the abject, innocence and depravity, sensuality and horror.

Sturrock charges into the room towards two doors tied to pillars, facing one another like sentinels. He throws his body at the doors in repeated acts of mutual destruction, his bare flesh tearing as the fabric of the door is destroyed, fragments scattering over the floor, some remnants left uselessly hanging against the pillars. Within this ruin something waits to be seen and heard and read and recorded by the newly tempered senses. This shift is marked by Sturrock as he now dresses himself, in black suit and tie, as if attending some formal celebration, or perhaps a funeral ceremony. Sitting amongst his ruins, after his apoplectic apocalypse, Sturrock is suddenly like a boy, playing quietly, carefully placing fragments of the doors together. And as he sits – a large figure behind this humble emerging form – we watch as he builds a small house – precariously holding itself together on a square patch of earth on the floor.

Apocalypse comes to us at moments of catastrophe and cataclysm, at times of shattering or breaking apart or ending and completion. Sturrock brings about his own apocalypse, not in the global terms we normally associate with the word, but as a microcosm, his inner world of identity and history. Apocalypse reveals to us in the destruction of the old, the creation of the new coming into being. It is through / after the shock and terror and violence of death that the world or the individual can emerge, perhaps scarred but with a new identity, and with new possibilities.

Mitchell similarly explores the territory of male identity and what that might mean in contemporary society. We hear talk of a crisis of male identity – perhaps it is just that men – after women and gays and ethnic groups – are the last to get to grips with questions of identity. There seems at the heart of both artists’ work an ambivalence – on the one hand presenting a critique of stereotypical male behaviour in terms of aggression and violence, modern-day rituals of initiation etc, yet nevertheless presenting us with a spectacle of male aggression, albeit directed ultimately against themselves. Mitchell’s work, however, has a darkly humorous twist – his pint-swigging bungee piece for example, which mixes extreme sport with lad culture – these almost animal proofs of survival of the fittest, proving one’s virility, proving oneself to be ‘a real man’. Mitchell takes his actions to such an extreme, so that through exhaustion, the impossibility created by repetition, the difficulty of the tasks he sets himself, we see him ‘fail’, and in this failure he reveals himself as vulnerable, undermining the apparent display of machismo. In ‘Twist and Shout’, we see two monitors back to back. In one Mitchell is dancing to the sounds of a fight. In the other, he fights to the sounds of the Beatles ‘Twist And Shout’. This piece in particular seems purely a celebration of male aggression. Yet, the piece of music is perhaps key – being from the 60’s (the days of our parents youth) perhaps Mitchell is pointing to a time when men and women’s roles where very clearly defined and circumscribed. And Mitchell’s movements seem to be barely contained within the parameters of the screen – in fact, at times he looks as if he’s trying to fight (or dance) his way out.

A lamp heater sits opposite an electric fan on a small Formica table. Their placement and functions suggest an antagonistic dialogue, which is further reinforced by their angle and scale - the lamp leans forward overbearingly, dwarfing the fan, which is tilted back, as if in defence, barely able to maintain its position. At first take this is comical light-hearted piece of coolly retro work, yet one is soon drawn into the pathos of this tabletop drama. Robinson works with a light touch, achieving a simple eloquence that transmits the tragedy of power dynamics within human relationships - one exerting its will on the other, the other frantically trying to resist, to counter the effects of this oppression, to appease. Ultimately, neither one gets anywhere; both caught in a perpetual stalemate.

Fielding’s photographic art, taken as a body of work, appears schizophrenic. There is the portraiture - performance documentation works, the sexually deviant decadence of his Stimulata pictures, and his relentless paparazzi eye at openings. And then there is the work that deals with inanimate objects, from dead birds to soiled blankets and plastic toys. What unifies Fielding’s practice is an exploration of the perimeters of taste. To engage with his work is to cross to the wrong side of the tracks, where our nice middle-class sensibilities are affronted. This does more than ask us to question the nature of the aesthetic experience and how it is bound up with judgement and taste. What Fielding reveals to us in the abject is a dark and melancholic beauty, while in the apparent superficiality and frivolity of kitsch, he exposes us to the Uncanny. It is the latter style/strategy that Fielding employs for the Glassworks show.

In his famous essay on the subject, Freud attempts to categorise the Uncanny. He identifies one element of experiencing the uncanny as when something inanimate appears to have the qualities of, or to actually become, a living thing. Freud illustrates this point by retelling Hoffman’s Sandman, a novel in which the main protagonist falls in love with a doll. In the pieces Rrrraw Desire and Pigs Might Fly Fielding images two found objects. One is a plastic female doll, the other a plastic humanised pig – both wear bizarre expressions of desire and pleasure / seduction respectively. The girl-doll has a lascivious smile and huge dilated pupils. The baby-pig lies back, hands behind head in absurd cliché of that seductive pose (from between two bits of bread!). Fielding parodies this investing of inanimate objects with human qualities by treating them to all the attentions and the conventions of portrait photography. An unnerving subtext gnaws at you from behind the surface of these seemingly celebratingly kitsch images - something strange yet familiar. Someone said ‘It makes me feel dirty’ – like the cheapening of human experience in this disposable culture, like the loss of our innocence.

The word ‘eurhythmy’ relates to structure, order and harmony, and also to the expression of the spirit of music through bodily movements. Eu, meaning good [via Latin from Greek] and rhuthmos, meaning proportion. Through an exploration and application of classical principles of form, Andrew Cooper has created an inter-active sculptural work.

Appropriately occupying ‘centre stage’ in the Glassworks show is Cooper’s Eurhythmy – a large glass house, which stands on a lawn of green rubber. Both in and around the glass room are a series of structures, of varying heights, made from the bottle-green glass plates of electricity pylons, acting as conductors. Outside the room, these are free standing, while within they are suspended from rafters, hovering low above the ground. Cooper has created a glass forest, a strange space in which one’s movements provide triggers for sound. It is a sonic chamber, an alchemical vessel, in which movement is transformed into sound. The viewer also becomes part of the sculpture visually, as he/she moves within, observed by others outside.

Experiencing Eurhythmy may cause us to reflect on the nature of our relationships – with our environment, with others, and with the world. One moves intimately amongst these structures, as in the city amongst people, or a forest through trees, and our actions have an impact. It has been built both in relation to the human form and to the larger space in which it stands. Indeed, one could read this as a site-specific work, for its scale in terms of the space has such a pleasing effect of ‘rightness’, while its structure echoes the unique idiosyncrasies of the architecture of the space. This concern with architecture is further demonstrated by the presence of three architectural drawings against the back wall. At first pristine against the crumbling plaster and brick, these diagrams, although framed, become gradually soiled by the determined emanations of the old glassworks building, precision contrasted by the residues of un-orderable processes.

High against a white wall hangs a crudely cut dress - a dry papery skin, with stitches like sutures, and white, with the purity of a child or a bride. Low on a perpendicular wall is a blackened flickering; the thrown shadows of a thrumming super 8 projector. Pale hands are running themselves across dark, heavy fabric, caressing the deep folds with feline absorption. In close-up we see eyes, large and watery with excitement, looking vaguely out at us and past us, with pupils black as jet, dilated with desire. Huge scissors glint as they split the darkness. Fingers dance gracefully as they push a needle in and out of cloth against a body. She is sewing herself into the garment like a delicate prison.

The title of the work comes from Hyph, meaning web, and philia - an attachment to. Hyphepheliacs are those who are aroused by touching fabrics or other garments. As a viewer we feel ourselves being seduced into sharing the fetish. There are connotations of sadomasochism – the fabric becomes a metaphor for skin, its folds mimicking the female genitalia, which is then cut into. Yet the gaze is defiantly (or invitingly) returned to us, albeit with an intriguing ambiguity. This quivering slice of B-movie-esque low-fi Noir is deliciously and eeerily sensual.

Sara Rees © 2002