Overview

Stephen Bishop, Rachel Goodyear, Matt Lippiatt, Pete Smith and Clara Ursitti

Looking at Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’, Unheimlich offers a glimpse of the everyday where something is not right.

Freud used this term to explain the phenomenon that occurs when ideas and feelings from childhood, which have become repressed in the adult, are suddenly re-awakened, and the familiar becomes ‘unheimlich’ or unhomely.

The artists in this exhibition have created a new body of work where familiar items are displaced and disturbing images of suburban life sit alongside bizarre stuffed animals and animated installations of dismembered mechanical limbs. The effect is unsettling, the shift subtle and the sensation lingers long after the visitor has left the Gallery. Unheimlich, rather than intending to shock simply unnerves.

In Matt Lippiatt’s installations the creative products of a family household, expressed through personalised birthday cake decoration and teenage fan doodles, are juxtaposed with allusions to destructive behavioural patterns.

Rachel Goodyear’s drawings capture glimpses of everyday life where something is not quite right. Burnt gateposts, abandoned clothing and violent images of wild birds and animals, force the viewer to pay more attention to their own experience of suburban life.

The effect of sensory perception in defining our mental landscape is central to the work of Clara Ursitti. In her recent role as the Arts Council England, Helen Chadwick Fellow, Ursitti worked at the University of Oxford within the Department of Experimental Psychology to learn more about the senses, which inspired a new body of work. For Unheimlich, Ursitti’s work imagines a parallel future where the fate of humans and dolphins are intertwined, exposing a fantastic, hidden history.

Sculptor Stephen Bishop is concerned with the tensions between the natural world and the man made. He shows us a place where foxes are impaled on neon lights, squirrels are stuck in concrete blocks and young deer are curled around a concrete doll, creating a collision between the normally free spirited wildlife and the mundane materials of everyday life.

Pete Smith’s complex animated installations grow quite organically from memories of his childhood, and his experience of working in menial roles or on factory floors throughout his adult life. Recalling the work of Robert Gober, Jean Tinguely and Gregor Schneider, Smith’s private, mental space takes on a life of its own, as disembodied memories are reincarnated as mechanical limbs, and endlessly performing automata.

Gallery opening hours | Mon - Sat 11am-5pm, Weds 11am-7pm

Please note the Gallery will be closed on Monday 5 May.

Guided Tours
Monday 21 & Tuesday 22 April, 1pm