The exhibition Tough Love, curated by Christine Morrow, begins with the whimsy of a suitcase filled with colourful knickers embroidered with the name of ‘exes’. Romi Graham’s homage to celebrity… Conquests (after Paris Hilton), the starting and ending point to the exhibition, lends lightness, if only in its riot of colours and patterns, to an otherwise disquieting exhibition. The gallery is partitioned; the lightness of the front room belies the unease that begins to grow as you move from work to work. The complexity of the works and the effect that they have deepens; what is going on here?
In the first room there is a visceral sense of unease. Tiffany Parbs’s Bond, a digital print of two people joined by the mouth with a glass tube, their spit pooling in a vial in the centre, conjures strange disgust—ridiculous when you think of the spit exchanged in a kiss. In her photograph beside Bond, a blister has formed in place of a wedding ring: has the wedding ring become too tight, rubbed too much, become restricting, or is the body trying to reject the infection of marriage?
Fiona Roberts’s Door Knocker continues the journey into disquiet with a horrifying brass head with a large knocker/ring protruding from its wide, screaming mouth in the place of a tongue. Roberts’s beautifully knotted whips are also in the front room. The whips are made from horse hair and constructed in a technique taught to prisoners in the United States, as occupational therapy. The red whip, is like a drop of blood against the gallery wall; the black one tightly knotted in on itself—the free flow of a horses tail bound