REVIEW

Love and Death exhibition at The Pink Cabbage gallery, Middle Street, Stroud

ENTERING the curiously named Pink Cabbage gallery, one is greeted by a series of masks, embedded in earth, in the window. One mask has a fortuitous snail in it, settled in like a damaged eyeball. The masks leer, unsure whether they are dead or in the grips of lust.

The majority of the Stroud Arts Festival Love & Death exhibition is dark, unsettled and strange - George Richards' mordant optical illusion that allows you to fuse the faces of strangers or loved ones with skulls, Gypsy's absorbing twilit landscapes and Karen Green's bright and painful drawings of women are visually arresting and somewhat overwhelming when seen together.

It is a relief, then, when one finds Henri Kyriacou's lavish photograph of a nude, laid out bright in the darkness like a languid Pacific archipelago, and more so still to see the compelling Plaster of Paris sculpture of a man carrying a woman, by Paul Thornycroft, which profoundly expresses the weights and tendernesses of love, and which I could watch for hours.

Even with these leavening pieces, however, the exhibition could feel a little too dark, but Jo Sanders' monoprint collages of pets prepared for burial (a dead mouse next to a matchbox; a budgie wrapped in kitchen roll then laid over newspaper and a child's letter to God) bring a lightly knowing innocence to the show.

Of all the excellent artists on display, Jo's work most effectively fuses in each picture the dual themes, capturing love and brutal endings from a child's perspective, with a sharp breath of wit and a delicate eye that takes much of the painful sting from this remarkable exhibition.

It's a pity it's only on until the end of this week.

Adam Horovitz