A rich and engaging show at Buckinghamshire Chilterns show. Highlights included the sculptures of Nick Harvey, whose work seemed to show how fragility, prickliness, and aggressive defence can go together in a poignant way. Jeanette Twybill’s spliced and re-arranged stills from classic films like ‘Gilda’ proved as tantalisingly evasive and finally ungraspable as the best Noir women. Alexandra Hoellmuller showed paintings with surfaces so lovely, accumulated, time-worn and complex, it seemed impossible that they were the products of a human hand. In Anthony Wilson’s chess-as-war installation, he presented a tumultuous piece, somewhere between frieze and flotsam, charting the inexorable progression from pageantry to massacre, in a manner reminiscent of Rodin’s ‘The Gates of Hell’. Catriona Collins showed found and decrepit objects that she bestowed with a new kind of dynamism, extending their life cycles by implicating them in a visual metaphor. The works are best represented in the artist’s own words:
“My project first grew from thoughts around the varying atmospheres found in different hospital spaces. I have sugar coated found objects that are in a state of decay. The sugary surface liquidises and re-solidifies when confronted with natural elements: it is this state of flux that relates to the relentlessness of hospital life.”
'Glass Boy' by Nick Harvey
Work by Jeanette Twibill
Work by Alexandra Hoellmueller
Work by Stephanie Brooks
Detail from installation by Anthony Wilson
Work by Thomas Collison
Work by Christopher Compton
Work by Catriona Collins
