We are proud to present a journey through the imagined worlds of three British artists. Tim Wright's portals and openings lead to Kate Tedman's musings on sign and symbol and then plunge into the fantastic tales of Dolly Thompsett.
Each explores ideas of painting as an opportunity to modify perception and to evoke the experience of being transported to other realms of place and consciousness. These artists enquire into the undiscovered and the hidden. Inciting the viewer's curiosity, they frame the question: "What on earth do we find here?"
Tim Wright's fluently seductive paintings deploy a recurring motif - that of an elaborately carved Rococo frame. Together with what is contained, the frame variously suggests an aperture, an eye, a lens or a mirror. It is also a gateway through which information is transmitted and transformed.
The device draws and focusses attention to an inchoate vortex of paint onto which viewers can project their own imaginings. The foliated ellipse sits in a sea of turbulent and expressively-handled paint, whose films, skins and veils articulate the mist, spray and vapour of an elemental and unknown landscape.
The paintings make oblique reference to the disturbing worlds of Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass", Tarkovsky's "Solaris" and Turner's late-period sea-pieces.
Kate Tedman exhibits paintings and embroideries that chart connections between diverse motifs, signs and symbols. Anamorphic forms combine with graphic iterations of birds and animals, and passages of representational painting. Sharing the unifying space of the picture plane, links are formed between culturally disparate figurations. We experience a magic-carpet reverie of notional connections and correspondences.
This is an inventory of exoticism that brings to mind the inquisitive and acquisitive Orientalism of the nineteenth-century European explorer, immersing themselves in 'the other'.
The artist makes quasi-maps of the iconography of colonial exchange, stitching connections across time and space to form a cultural amalgam and, what she describes as, "a system for survival".
Dolly Thompsett presents us with meticulously rendered images of densely woven incident, where fantastic tales of shipwreck, hazard and strange encounter are played out. Post-apocalyptic dream landscapes are stages for dark and mysterious scenarios; birds, animals, insects and tiny people inhabit ruins overrun by vegetal, corrupted Edens.
There is a pervading sense of a hallucinogenic, over-heated atmosphere of perceptual overload and distortion, which summon up the teeming mind-scapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Richard Dadd.
The paintings echo fanciful tales of Victorian adventuring set to a background evocative of the sinister, gothic spirit of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.
In the work of all three painters things are not what they seem. They are "contrariwise": mirrors do not reflect; cultural symbols are juxtaposed to make new associations; nursery stories contain uncanny imaginings.
The show is an outlandish voyage, beyond the surface, that ends up throwing the viewer back on themselves.
