The World of Glass St Helens, 26th March – 20th May 2022
Once through the looking glass, familiar reality recedes. In the very depths of our imagination we step through a portal into what may be a dream, or maybe the underworld, or the heavens. In a world of universal myths, of fairy tales, nothing is quite what it seems: logic, inverted, fails. Perceptions are distorted, blurring object and image, substance and illusion, sleep and wakefulness, in this strange and multiple world: a nonsensical drama peopled by unlikely characters. In this reflection of taken-for-granted reality we become aware of the days slipping through our fingers like sand. The very relationship between past, present and future comes into question: time and mirrors fragment. Our hearts are frozen, we are running out of time, can we, should we, will we, awake?
Maya Chowdhry: Green Sand Won’t Save Us. Humans are fascinated by the concept of time, humans are also running out of time with regard to climate change and are scrabbling for technological fixes, such as using a green volcanic sand to absorb CO2. Using sand timers, a mirror and an audio soundscape this intimate, interactive, installation asks us to gently contemplate whether there is really any time left.
Jane Fairhurst: Portals/Water Mirrors. The Ancients saw water as a portal to the underworld whilst reflecting the heavens.Taking her garden pond as such a portal, Jane transforms the pond into photographic images, which become watercolour sketches that, in her studio, become oil paintings. The work explores the three levels of the portal, the surface or human sphere; the reflections of the heavens above, and, beneath the surface, the underworld.
Sarah Feinmann: Looking Glass House. Empty windows and their reflections often feature in Sarah’s practice. These works are based on a series of grainy photographs, taken at night looking into a house. Each window becomes a looking glass, reflecting back the outside world, a mix of shadows, landscape and the inside space. These pieces become further fragmented, alluding to the way that events happen repeatedly in Alice’s looking glass world.
Sarah Feinmann A House for Getting in the Way
Tina Finch: Dreams and Reality. Alice climbs through a mirror into a fantastical world of reflections where logic and reality are suspended. In the boundary between waking and sleeping reality ends and dreaming begins. Tina uses an eclectic mix of subjects and styles to explore relationship between illusion and reality.Surreal landscapes, unlikely characters and nonsensical poetry create a strange and dramatic world.
White Queen Tina Finch
Sabrina Fuller: Jam Today. ‘Living backwards makes one a little giddy at first’, remarks the White Queen to Alice. Ideas of linear time, and of a single, uniform, present were introduced to progress colonialism and capitalism. Alice Through the Looking Glass – like modern physics and ancient philosophy – questions the relationship between past, present and future. In Jam Today voices from St Helens – in conversation, in poetry and in song – delve into our relationship with time and its manifestations.
Claire Hignett: It all started with a broken mirror. In Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, The Snow Queen, a wicked magician, creates a mirror that shrinks everything good and beautiful to nothing and magnifies all that is ugly and useless. When the mirror breaks, shards cover the earth changing perceptions and freezing hearts. Using the story of The Snow Queen as a guide, Claire has created a series of sumptuous tableau containing remnants of fairy tales and dreams, taking us on a journey through friendship and love, loss and forgetting, danger and adventure, search and rescue.
Paddy O’Donnell: On Reflection. Paddy is fascinated by the idea of another world: always there, but out of reach; moving to a different beat; experienced fleetingly though never seen in full. He aims to capture a sense of that elusive experience. In art, as in life, he makes use of what a given situation presents. Why not the gallery space itself – and glass of course?
Christopher Rainham: Where the Rain Will Fall. Many traditional stories have suffered from Disneyfication, while the originals are darker, crueller and more frightening. Alice Through the Looking Glass is full of these scary elements. The action takes place in woods, forests and the deep recesses of our imagination. These subjects are the starting points of Christopher’s painting and drawing, reimagining the unnerving multiplicity of a world turned upside down, inside out: lost in the dark, shadowy forest watched by Carrion Crows.
Ian Vines: Mirror and Image. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice seems to slip through a large dissolving mirror, from one world to the next. Much of Ian’s recent work plays with reflections, optical distortions and all kinds of visual trickery. Often, there is a dialogue between objects and images, or real space and pictorial space, reality and illusion. The intention is to engage the spectator in the process of looking.
Ian Vines, Mirror and Image, In the Balance
Claire Hignett
Sarah Feinmann All the Ways Around Here Belong to Me
Jane Fairhurst Portal 4-Thin Ice
Jane Fairhurst Portal 1-Pond Ice