Notions of isolation and remoteness are a theme of Daphne Wright's installations, and they are to the fore in Nonsense And Death, her aptly titled new show. We are presented with a room of dark, skeletal trees whose wire branches form a dense, delicate filigree, reaching out to make an enclosing, stifling network.
The black branches bear sinister, curious bean pods and heavy, funereal purple and mauve flowers. Within the encroaching lattice are two small pale birds, resembling herons, sitting in isolation with no sense of interaction or acknowledgment of each other.
Crude, heavy cement bases, reminiscent of destroyed walls, serve to earth these ephemeral structures and their strange harvest. Sound is a regular feature of Wright's installations, and on this occasion the visual element is accompanied by a recording of a woman's voice reciting a number of Edward Lear limericks.
Initial novelty quickly gives way to frustration, as the incessant repetition pervades the exhibition space with its tiresome pointlessness. What Wright has created is a Garden of Eden turned sour, a strange, post-apocalypse limbo with the ominous calm and inevitability of some metaphysical, Dantean half-life and the bleakness of a Samuel Beckett vision.
Augmenting this potent ambience are two series of photographic intaglio prints. There is a sense of confinement and austerity in the dark, claustrophobic black-and-deathly-white images of Where Do Broken Hearts Go, pictures of bygone convent or orphanage life, while These Talking Walls presents hazy, overcast rural landscapes, sparsely populated with trees and telegraph poles: blurred, indistinct and heavy.
As with previous work, Wright shows the ability to address a subtle emotional territory that lies beyond the purely visual or verbal, presenting a curious subliminal world, full of nuance, that persists in the memory long after the experience.
Runs until Friday
