Rachel Goodyear
We will cancel your membership
and you will owe us nothing.

7 May to 5 June 2005

Two Hounds of Hell cross each other’s paths. One drops the severed head from its mouth and they are caught going round in a tight circle sniffing each other’s arses.
 
Within her drawings, using various styles, Rachel Goodyear creates gently disturbing images of weird beauty: a birdhouse filled to overflowing with a trapped bird, an impossible rope bridge across a deadly ravine. Balanced between playful curiosity and sadistic torment, this body of work offers a mass of ambiguous truths colliding with the blatantly invented.

The drawings are displayed unmounted on the wall, with no apparent elevation of status from conception to display, just as in the content the mundane and the spectacular exist on the same plane. The clustered drawings allow disjointed narratives to be strung together, tying the blessed and the cursed in uneasy union.
3D work is frequently constructed by delicately adding to existing objects, in pieces which continue the subtle menace of the drawings.
 
Rachel Goodyear (b.1978) is based in Manchester. She has recently exhibited at Mostyn Open 2005, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; Post notes, ICA, London and Midway Contemporary Arts, Minneapolis.