Nocturne

Overview

In music, a nocturne is drawn from the night or other dusky moods. At the Object Gallery's Project Space, Janet Lawrence and Lee Mathers are exhibiting their own nocturnal visions. Lee Mathers' four pieces form a single image of sky and stars. She uses a series of clear, luminescent fairy lights to paint out words and objects. The most striking as you enter are lines from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury written in fairy light across the black sky.  The words spill down over the floor, and across a box full of the things they describe. On the other side white fairy lights push up from the floor, sprouting glass ashtrays. Between these lights, three tiny dandelions with luminescent bright cores shine, their LED globes stuffed with real dandelion pods. These three little tufts, with tough hearts glowing, seem to sit in midair with their own solemn purpose.

Janet Lawrence's work sits on a white shelf, opposite Mathers' black wall. She presents smoky glass panes, fuzzy like an X-ray, which lean back between the black dead branches of one tree and the white-antlered limbs of another, a small owl trapped in the second's branches and both veiled in thin fabric. The work seems lost in itself — lost between trees, in strange tides or the spectre of creeping molds and fungi. Branching white tissue, forking limbs and the sensation of snow on a dead forest seem to overwhelm the individual parts of Lawrence's whole work. The cold and the shivers stay with you, despite the warm summer rain pattering on the roof of the object gallery in real life. And while the Object Gallery is beautiful in itself, up close the broad sweeps of these works fail to resolve into single pictures, as you can only back away from them so far. But edge back as far as you dare and you'll still see some little slices of night.

Image by Steve Ryan.