Heather & Ivan Morison, Ben Rivers, David Thorpe

Heather and Ivan Morison presented a new body of work using objects, performance and puppetry to draw on the life and work of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan. This new work was framed within  Anna,  an allegorical piece of object theatre that depicted a tale of love in ominous and foreboding times.  Anna’s  three narrators were represented by a large netted sphere that floats sun-like in the gallery space and two contrasting large-scale wall works, produced using soot and black bone pigment, and chalk and white bone pigment. This new exhibition complemented the Morisons’ outdoor commission for the gallery,  The Black Cloud,  2011.

Ben Rivers showed his award-winning film  Slow Action.   Fresh from the Viennale Film Festival, this post-apocalyptic science-fiction film comprises a series of four 16mm sections filmed on location at three island sites across the globe: Lanzarote, Gunkanjima and Tuvalu, as well as Somerset in England.  Presenting a series of constructed realities, the film exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction, with soundtrack narratives by American novelist and critic Mark von Schlegell. From the same body of work Rivers will also exhibit a series of photographic portraits entitled  Somerset Clade.