Figurings of the Real

The crumbling shell of Safehouse 1, an archetypal London terraced property, creates a pivotal site where an emptied structure is temporarily filled with fresh imaginings: here is an abandoned domestic space where figures, dreams and movement can interlace with the faded remnants of previous lives, previous residents. Andrew McDonald’s paintings and sculptures present speculative versions of identity and interiority, centred on masklike faces and harlequin diamond patterns – the mixed history of the harlequin here evoking the provisional nature of our selves. In Thomasina Smith’s waking dream world, she creates a symbolic story, partly influenced by medieval religious art, but reinvented. Women hold smaller creatures within themselves, ships sail in the trees — people journeying together in community, a celebration of being alive. Embedding himself in the hinterlands of Suffolk, amongst ancient forests and abandoned airbases, Matthew Swift creates hairy, abstract mixed-media works. Predominantly rectangular structures become holding points where traces of bodies and landscapes appear, carrying impressions of the Suffolk terrain into familiar domestic spaces. The art-works in Figurings of the Real explore the spaces where lived experience, memory and inner reality converge. The real exists but we only have access to it through provisional and shifting views such as these. Here, the objective reality of the past and of other lives is not fixed or static but is rendered into subjective new figures, authoritative, dream-like, and abstracted, continually engendering surprising forms of representation. Within the crumbling rooms of Safehouse 1, these fragments of experience are given new shapes — hovering between what has been lived, what is remembered and what might yet be imagined.