This exhibition presents new collaborative video and photographic work by Lucy Campbell and Helen Shanahan. A series of three experimental films are looped together, Hair, Bed and Sleep. In addition to the video, nine stills from each film are shown in series, as if telling the story in linear form. Two further pieces are shown, Skin (photos) and String (video stills), and are presented as large-scale photographic works.

Lucy Campbell works in experimental film, photography, and installation, using understated satire to explore experience. She sets up situations, which beguile and unsettle.

Hair (Lucy Campbell, 2007) is a video piece in which a woman sits at a kitchen table, her back towards you, gradually cutting off her long hair. Her motivation is obscure and inscrutable. This insidiously violent act takes place within a comfortable, orderly setting, evoking the silent tensions of female experience.

Skin (Lucy Campbell, 2007) is a series of images of her parents ageing skin revealed to be strange and fragile in extreme close up.

 

Helen Shanahan’s video work creates seductive images of bodies and domestic interiors within narratives that explore the complexities of intimate relationships. In seeking to transcribe experiences, which are “mercurial and ongoing,” she interrogates and subverts narrative structure. The relationships depicted in her work normally present alternatives to a hetero-normative view of gender roles.

String (Helen Shanahan, 2006) shows two people entangled in wool, shot in such occult darkness and at such close range that they cannot be distinguished from one another. The nature of their activity is ambiguously hostile and sexual.

Sleep (Helen Shanahan, 2007), is an immersive and rhythmical piece in which she and her partner are apparently in a perpetual, restless sleep.

Bed (Lucy Campbell and Helen Shanahan, 2008), shows Lucy Campbell’s parents in bed, ambiguously secure and/or entrapped. Married for almost fifty years, they are sewing themselves together and into their bed. The bed itself is sewn to the walls and ceiling of a room which is as bare as a stage. Bed evokes a relationship aggregating through decades, becoming dense and impenetrable both from without and within.

The majority of the exhibition will be displayed within the openspace (bar) although some pieces can be viewed in the Box Office foyer.

Opening times for the openspace (bar) are Wednesday to Friday from 5pm until at least 11pm and on Saturday from 6pm until at least midnight. The Box Office foyer is open Monday to Friday from 10am until 6pm or later if it is a performance night.

Outside of these weekday opening times the exhibition can also be viewed by appointment, please contact the Box Office on 0161 615 0500 for further details and to arrange a viewing.