The Craft is the fantastical documentation of a fictional sect. Created by the artists Emma Talbot and Cathie Pilkington it brings together an anthology of work claiming to document the existence of a hitherto undiscovered isolated community. The exhibition will present the artists’ ‘finds’ in the form of a museological compilation of objects, tableau and paintings. This home-spun museum of curiosities is the fictitious hinterland which reveals Cathie Pilkington and Emma Talbot’s collective fascination with the darker side of human experience including their interests in gothic obsession, entrenched belief systems and communal codes of behaviour.
For The Craft, Pilkington will produce a range of customized found objects, which claim various usages within the community. These assisted ready-mades take diverse forms: domestic furniture richly embellished with second hand carpet, ceramic ornaments re-invented to produce ritualistic looking icons or totems and soft toys so intensively hand made that their original identification is obliterated.
Extending her use of figuration collated from architectural journals, life style magazines and film sets, Talbot’s women drift from the mass media into this surreal world. She depicts these inhabitants of the community engaged in bizarre unsettling practices whilst many of the objects on show find their way onto the paintings as a mark of authenticity of the fictitious fraternity.
The Craft presents a disorientating spectacle, which shifts from believable documentation to hyper-real fantasy and back again.
The Craft is presented by Transition Gallery in association with Marlborough Fine Art.
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