Gallery 17 - Other Hands

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- The Rhinocerus and the Teapot
- Entourage
- Rhinocerus Tea
- The Struggle
- Lady Grey
- Lady Grey Departing
- The Tea Cup Fairy
- The Trophy
- Plucking the Rose III
- The Mushroom
- Renoir's Doughnut
- Plucking the Rose II
- The Broadbeans
- The Bread
- Tea Leaves
- Tea Time
- The Offering
- Balance
- The Messenger
- Study for Rhinocerus Tea
- Dadd's Fairies
- Leading the Governess
- Before the Stork
- The Teacup and the Plait
- Meta Luna
- Cheesecake Fairy

I have always found sanity a wonderfully elusive mist... a normalizing fog that continually fails to hide the far more interesting things that experience can suggest.

In my last exhibition the fairy theme began as a tribute to my mother, who introduced me to a place of mystery and delight. I grew up with the safe Edwardian fairy folk of Arthur Rackham. It was only much later that I discovered the demented Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd.

In my new work, the visions of Dadd's insanity combine with the poetic logic of fairy tales and mythology to provide another way of seeing the world around us. This is the irrational world of strange forces and passions our contemporary culture has no place for. We dismiss such quaint experiences as imperfections left over from our primitive beginnings. These are seen as fit only for anthropology or the pathology of psychosis.

In the geology of experience, there are many layers... some apparent and some quite hidden from the normal view. We look, yet often miss the laminated nature of things and activities surrounding us. Simple routines are not what they seem. Is that my hands cutting the bread or sorting the beans? Did I do this same thing yesterday or was it some other hands? Is that something pulling at the teacup as I put it to my lips? Surely there is a shadow trotting along just behind the teapot. Are these memories, associations or hallucinations tricking the vision? Or are there perhaps even stranger forces at work here?

I begin to see that the simple tableaux we take for reality is, in fact, "peopled" by a much richer and stranger crowd of others.

James Guppy

June 2009