THE Fire Station is not the judicial venue for an exhibition, but Margaret Tuffy makes the best of the small space, most of which is around a steep stairwell, with a series of paintings in which gravity is often one of the key players.
High up in the stairs hangs Panning for Gold, where the confused directions of paint drips conjure up a net of disordered time lines. The canvas has obviously been turned and re painted several times, as the painter mimicked the actions of a prospector with a metal plate, panning the waters for nuggets.
Ignore the alchemic pretensions of such an idea, and one could watch instead the way, on an adjacent canvas, that the painter seems to discover, late in the day, that the best answer can be among the most obvious.
Two linked works, Chavela and Divisions I-VII, continue the alchemic theme bringing together gold and black, preciousness and invisibility. Chavela, a small, deep canvas, features a vague, golden form drifting in darkness. In Divisions, seven similar canvases evoke the infinite variety of experience, but also, when seen together, suggest a great rift in the fabric of the knowable.
Becoming, a series of tiny, figurative bronze and wood sculptures dotted about the building, again explores a set of possibilities, this time focusing on what might happen if a human body were cross pollinated with a flower.
