Lisa Fielding-Smith   Polly Gould   Kate Scrivener

Lisa Fielding-Smith  Quiver  2005

film still

23 September 30 October 2005

The three artists in this exhibition present works imbued with fantasy, desire and violence which test reality and open up many possibilities.

The protagonist in Lisa Fielding-Smith's new video Quiver performs versions of female fantasy and desire.  The artist uses minimal props and costumes to create theatrical situations that engender of sense of anticipation, suspense and tension.  Quiver is a three-minute loop shot on colour digital video: three minutes being the total time allowed during an archery tournament to shoot three arrows into the target.  The target in the film has been replaced by a similar size round silver mirror resting on a stand in the middle of a field.  The mirror fills the whole frame of the image, in which the reflection of a woman stands wearing a long black dress traditionally associated with mourning. She holds a large bow equipped with devices used for accurate shooting such as a sight, various arm and finger extensions and a long black stabiliser protruding from the front of the bow.  

Polly Gould works with drawing, video, sound and performance. She is concerned with our relationships as speaking subjects, the nature of memory and experience and the uses and abuses of words and voice. Whether installations of paper, ink and pencil drawings, texts and Polaroid photographs, audio sound tracks or video projections with performance, the artist explores the role of conversation in our expressions of vulnerability, violence, power and desire.

Kate Scrivener's work references environmental observations that relay the effects of events within the landscape.  The phenomena have potential that is outside of our control and involve the extra ordinary, the extreme and the seemingly unaccountable.  Some Billions of Years of This investigates the complex nature of a given landscape and hitch perceptual elements together through the relationships and organisation of its layered painted parts.  These parts combine detailed painted texts with multi-layers of painterly surfaces.  Some Billions of Years of This, the paintings of a Supernova which is a fast and violent dying star, is constructed through texts that are transcribed from one person's collection of newspaper cuttings of the 1969 moon landing and reports of space observations up to the present day.