DISRUPTED NARRATIVES: Stephen Chambers, Denise De Cordova, James Fisher
14 September - 14 October 2006

A Hoopoe bird sits astride a small wooden box, the glint of its painted eyes fixing you as you move around a three dimensional tableau that comprises of the bird, a cartoon-like boulder and a miniature billboard. A figure (No Name Man) is set within the colour field of a deep rose/pink ground. Above him is a tree strung with fairy lights and littered all around his feet is an agitation of tiny sticks. The image of a group of women dressed in 1930's walking gear emerges from the distressed patina of a painted background. They are drinking out of their wide brimmed hats.

Disrupted Narratives brings together three artists who use figuration to tell ambiguous visual stories, in which pictorial references to the real world are pushed into territories that go beyond simple representation. The works have unsettling resonances, which are in part to do with their layering of literal allusions - to nature, figures, objects, and also to do with the way they are physically made.
Denise De Cordova speaks of an arrangement of her sculptures as a 'fictional heap of nature studies' - each of the mixed media forms painted to give the illusory surfaces of plumage, wood or fungi. Wood is painted to look like wood, jesmonite is cast and carved, layered with gesso and painted to resemble stone.
In the paintings of Chambers and Fisher patterns and motifs are appropriated from textiles, wallpapers and other domestic sources to create complex, veiled surfaces that play with two dimensional space. The figures and objects that are placed into these layered grounds are disrupted by what lies behind or on the surface of the images.
By different means these artists suggest that reality is fluid and intangible. Their work offers up images that are familiar but which resist finite interpretations, without resort to easy irony.

Stephen Chambers studied at Winchester School of Art and St Martin's and completed an MA at Chelsea School of Art. He has exhibited extensively since 1987 and has won various awards including the 2005 Residency at the Scuola Internazionale di Venizia.
He is represented by Flowers East, London.

Denise De Cordova studied at Brighton Polytechnic and completed an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1983. She was a Henry Moore Foundation Fellow from 1984 - 1985 and has undertaken commissions for various arts bodies including the Public Art Development Trust.

James Fisher studied at the University of Brighton and attained an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1997. He has had solo shows with the Eagle Gallery and Rochester Art Gallery and is currently working on a commission for The Worcester Pilgrim Project for a forthcoming exhibition in October 2006. He is represented by the Eagle Gallery, London.