Derby was a mixed bag. In Photography I liked the deadpan documentation of Samuel Deffley, whose series ’91 Campion Street’ depicted objects with a painterly touch against a tan background, reminiscent of American tromp l’oeil paintings, Wes Anderson’s way with objects and the dangerously bland backgrounds of Francis Bacon. Similarly deadpan, and with an in-built restraint and distance, were Lynn Ball’s photographs of the various places in which people converge, like youth centres and sports halls.
Laura Horne’s ‘Cleethorpe in Bloom’ proved a witty title for a series that attempted to draw out the liveliness and colour of frivolous manmade structures against indifferent backgrounds.
Danielle Lindsay McCalmley cleanly juxtaposed views of the Bronte house with text from perhaps one or more of the Brontes, in ‘Absence Felt in Bronte’s House’, a sort of mystery that refused to be unravelled by the black and white of text, just one of the many thoughts that might not have found themselves on paper, instead lost in the atmosphere of the house. Michael Sargeant created mysterious, deepening photographs of woods, entitled ‘Dark dark woods’, while Jim Cowan’s ‘L’Inconnu’ seemed to reach back to another era of photography, to the likes of Julia Margaret Cameron while remaining modern, all without the telltale signs of fashion and clothes – his series of people emerging from baths rhymed in some mysterious way with the process by which photographs are developed in the darkroom, here the figures were caught somewhere between emergence and submergence.
In Crafts, great work was shown by Maggie Withington who uses found objects, often mass-produced and kitsch, and assembles them into sculptures in a humorous and witty way. Cally Ann Harrison produced work inspired by the forests to be found in fairytales and all their symbolism, while Jane Bevan created works like ‘Hedgerow’; her work achieved in a miniature form the elegance of sculptures by Cornelia Parker, who also is invested in only apparently bereft materials.
Two great spatial pieces were shown, the first by David Booth who created a monumental twisting, bulging but effusive sculpture from fake wood lino that was neatly lacerated and Natasha Meakin whose ‘Undeniable Presence’ was a truly effective (but difficult to photograph installation), partly inspired it seemed by Mike Nelson but with that artist’s departed presences articulated in the persistently disturbing but utterly banal mound of dirt against a brown carpet.
Alexandra Cavaye created a fetishistic and winding installation entitled ‘Sentimentalities and Space’, about the intimacies of the hidden, all projections of hands into the empty recesses of cupboards, and enveloped letters behind glass. Rachel Leaves combined line drawing and found objects, assembled together in a minimal way, fragments creating a whole.
Kerri Pratt showed a number of architecturally canny and beautifully observed large-scale paintings of cityscapes, verging on the abstract. While, Joseph McKenna’s almost livid paintings entitled “Industrial Cityscapes’, were like Turners for a nuclear age.