The Necker

Recasting the gallery space as a backdrop for the inversion of reality, The Necker is an exhibition of new works by Sebastian Thomas and Isabel Wilkinson. Using sculpture, collage, paper, canvas and print, the artists populate the space with forms born of a fascination with science fiction, mythology and the fragmentation of the mundane. Edging towards an edge, there are monsters creeping, dreams coming true and nightmares coming truer, glints of humor in the gloom. The Necker is a retelling of the world where familiar shapes warp and conspire to confound us, where forms germinate in good darkness and shadows gather in bad darkness. A kind of underworld where things move in another direction, and all the junk and specters of the overworld are revivified.

Abstract shapes in two-dimensional works flirt with sculptural pieces that hint at the bodily while utilising industrial materials, highlighting the artists’ interest in the tension between the landscape, the human body and manmade structures. Here in the margins of the lived world – and in this particular place, at the banks of Deptford Creek – unreality takes its chance to break free of its moorings and play host to a gathering of semi-fictional beings and places, and the arcane material left to drift there.

Wilkinson’s large-scale canvases begin with a thickly built-up layer of ink printed from a carborundum plate, rough brush strokes suggesting the pastoral imagery that she draws from. This is superimposed with layers of monoprinted paint marks sketching out figures and objects haunting these landscapes, their separation in space and time demarcated by colour and texture. Sculptural pieces constructed from roughly dyed and painted fabric and clay medals accompany the two-dimensional works.

Processes of collage and assemblage are central to Thomas’s practice. Found images and materials are deconstructed and then reassembled throughout the picture plane and the gallery space in an attempt to renegotiate our understanding of our environment. Detritus and leftover fragments of semi-fictional objects, places and protagonists build up in a stratum of debris across these imagined landscapes. This sequence of accretion builds a new world, where surfaces and objects teem with liveliness, contrasting with and lightening a doom-laden setting. The works of both artists are set against walls of drawn and rubbed marks, looming large and creating an all-encompassing scene