Tessa Farmer's Swarm Coming Soon

The fairies’ can bring to mind William Blake’s double-edged view of natural life. Individually they recall the protagonist of Blake’s ‘Ghost of a Flea’, where animal life seems characterised by blood-thirsty aggression and malevolence. Yet as a totality, ‘Swarm’ brings to mind Blake’s desire “to see the world in a grain of sand” by opening our imaginative flood-gates. Being half mammal and half skeleton, Tessa Farmer’s fairies occupy what seems to be a visionary, transitory state between life and death. Unlike the Wrights’ fairies, Farmer’s are barbarous, violent creatures, waging war on each other and upon the animal kingdom that surrounds them. The artist herself notes: “the fairies’ macabre appearance echoes their disconcerting behaviour. On peering closely into the ‘Swarm’, sinister scenes of abuse and bewildering chimeras emerge as we become absorbed into this almost apocalyptic vision.” The animating force behind even these, the smallest of all creatures, would seem to be belligerence and brutality, Farmer suggests. Nevertheless, a bittersweet humour underwrites her practice. Though we might view them as the unintended fruits of malign laboratory experiments, we cannot fail to be aware of their riotous absurdity. Her alchemical transformations of ordinary matter into vivid, enthralling life give shape to things as yet unknown, inspiring empathy and apprehension, wonder and anxiety in equal measure.