The Guardian

The Guide
Saturday July 5 -Friday July 11 2003

exhibitions

Truth And Beauty
NOTTINGHAM

Are people beginning to think and talk about aesthetics again? Modern artists’ attitudes to concepts of beauty have always been deeply fraught with am1bivaleilce. It sometimes seems as if beauty and ugliness are mutually dependent, or, indeed, that they are by historical turns mutually exchangeable. The Yard Gallery continues its excellent art programme with a scientific bent by staging this exhibition of beautiful images which contain a distinctly ugly undercurrent. Biomedical microscopic photographs here include images of cancerous tumours and the foot and mouth virus. All are stunning. Equally dangerously seductive are works by contemporary artists. Heather Barnett presents lightboxes (pictured) which crawl with organisms bred from her own footprints. Tracey Holland’s memento mori still-lifes evoke the dreadfull beauty of all dead and diseased nature.

Robert Clark
Yard Gallery, Sat 5 to Sep 7

The Guardian

The Guide
Saturday September 19th – Friday September 25 1998

Exhibitions: Vessel

Tracey Holland uses photography with considerably more atmospheric force than most painters get out of paint, or even than film directors get out of film. Here she sandwiches her photos between suspended sheets of glass and translucent beeswax. Holland is bats about bats and all things that squeak and creep in the night. Expect her usual menagerie of dead snakes, lizards and squashed frogs amidst habitats of alchemic gloom. Broken watch springs and lockless keys make up the props. Holland’s no undead Goth, though. She’s simply a talent patiently waiting for her due international recognition.

Robert Clark
Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffie/d, until November 1