‘Pleasurewood Thrills!’ is an interim show of MA Contemporary fine art students. The exhibition brings together a diversity of artistic practice, ranging from video, text-based, photographic and sculpture. Starting with familiar or overlooked aspects of everyday life all six artists express a desire to connect with and reinterpret the world around them. The resulting work is a journey into the quotidian, the nostalgic, the kitsch and the magical.

Claire Lount

As a photographer i am particularly fascinated with how souvenirs and ornaments function in our everyday lives, with a specific regard to nostalgia. By collecting together "lost" souvenirs I use them to personify scenes from gothic literature. The images invite the viewer to become lost inside the scene depicted and the otherwise overlooked objects are given a status as visual subjects within art's lexicon. Whilst also pushing the boundaries of their imaginative possibilities beyond their otherwise nostalgic function.

David McNab

'dreadnought'



An assemblage is not a set of predetermined parts (such as pieces of a plastic model aeroplane) that are then put together in order or into an already-conceived structure …. Nor is an assemblage a random collection of things, since there is a sense that an assemblage is a whole of some sort of that expresses some identity and claims a territory.
J. MacGregor-Wise

Diana Ali

'Distant Dialogues'



Image by Rebecca Wombell. Location: Lincoln.

The project reaches out to passer-bys worldwide asking them to engage in a dialogue with the artist for one year. It involves a sense of trust, curiosity, and connectivity as well as a chance encounter through correspondence. Participants in different locations have volunteered to put up the ‘call for correspondence’ in the form of a small poster where it may intervene in someone’s everyday routine, such as, a bus stop, in a phone box or on a lamp post. The project is currently part of Interventions Part 1: Dispersal curated by Anneka French.

Guy Thorpe

totenthirst



When people enter an unfamiliar environment they experience a temporary loss of control without the necessary language skills to explain themselves. This leads to a feeling of overwhelming loneliness and a sensation that you are the only one of your kind in your own world, at the same time separated from, and infinitely surrounded by the others - a language is formed.

Lesley Guy



Farah Fawcett

‘Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out their inherent magic nowhere more so than when those objects have become routinized and social.’ Michael Taussig

The defacement of obituary images serves to reveal the mystery of the lives they represent, to transgress the boundaries between our world and another and perhaps add meaning where words fail. Dead images are fertile ground, they come back to life as reincarnations, or perhaps more accurately, as zombies which are things neither living nor dead.

Paula Kirby

Video & Photographs



Fred Inglis outlines ten maxims for the perfect holiday including the notion that a holiday experience must be luxurious and beautiful. Luxury is frequently synonymous with kitsch leading many holidaymakers to reject the real for the hypereal. Perhaps Disneyland and Vegas illustrate Baudrillard’s maxim that the hyperreal supersedes the real.