Riflemaker
2 March – 24 April 2010
London W1

Anderson considers time, or more particularly the way that time shapes itself, to be her most significant working material. For her, memories can be described as reconstructions, often distorted to the extent that each becomes a creation or fiction itself. She views memory as the ‘master of fiction’, whereby the passage of time may lead to a remembrance being more akin to fiction than fact. (Riflemaker)

Impossible red hair weaves through the interior of this untouched building: It enters through the fireplace, winding its way through the buildings guts and emerges upstairs before making its way out of the window…this endless loop of a fairy tail.

I feel all at once dwarfed by the hair, there is perhaps a maze in there..or a treasure I cant quite get to, objects that have been overgrown and trapped by this Rapunzel hair. And I feel sure that I am in a nightmare and not a child’s bed time story. So it must be unsettling since many of those, on reflection, are disturbing enough.

Up stairs the theme continues in miniature. The pale, red haired girl is trapped in the black teeth of a high tower, or wrapped in her own hair, some of the very small figures are set within the ever decreasing circles of white forms reminding me of a foetus, disturbing in its execution and presented to us as ancient relics in glass cylinders or perhaps old glass towers.

Here is a distortion of memory tottering on the edge of autobiography, until the film ‘The Night I Became A Doll’- in the this case in the depths of the gallery accessed by rickety stairs -solidifies the possibility that true cruelty has taken place, some unspoken dissatisfaction that a mother can feel towards a daughter and vice versa. What looms here is the fear of discovering our disappointment with each other and then inevitably ourselves.

The Night I Became A Doll
9 Minute Video 16/9 ©2009

I came away feeling that I had experienced a living breathing entity.
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I also got trapped in the hair on my way out.
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photographic out takes HERE