Same Time, Different Place
Fiona Macalister, Helen Stringfellow, Anna Ray, Karen Loughridge
18 August - 29 September 2001

Same Time, Different Place was an exhibition of work by four Edinburgh-based artists working with a variety of media and concerns.

Anna Ray’s work is anchored by a fascination with the internal space of the body, it’s complexity, strength and frailty. Contemplating the experience (or non-experience) of anaesthesia, the work referred to surgery, during which others touch our insides as we sleep a dreamless sleep. Although we are constantly discovering more about the order of things essential for our bodies to work, we are all unique and the finer rules of medical science don’t always apply. We live with the knowledge that our bodies threaten decay, disease and malfunction and that no one lives forever. Bad Blood is a reaction to the inside of the body: the hidden workings and processes of microscopic cells and particles.

Fiona Macalister made work in response to the environment in and around a private boarding school. The Forbidden Book and The Punishment Book consist of school rules, old and new, official and unofficial, whose direct reference to school has been omitted. The absurdity of forbidding someone to take bites larger than two cubic inches capacity and punishments as mindless as picking daisies make one question the rules by which each of us live our lives. The books were accompanied by photographs featuring the artist, wearing a teacher’s gown, carrying out some of the more absurd punishments like ‘holding arms outstretched while holding shoes for as long as possible’.

In her latest project Stale Visions of Delight Karen Loughridge examined the role tourists play within the holiday industry. The would-be tourist dreams of escape to new and exotic surroundings but travels both to forget and remember where they stand. Focusing on the mechanics of holiday hype where women are widely used in travel adverts to represent the beauty of nature, the work used themes of escape, isolation and distance from reality to re-evaluate our position within a wider cultural fabric.

Helen Stringfellow’s body of work centred upon the perception of artifice and reality within the world presented to the tourist. The fascination with trivia is inescapable, particularly as illustrated by the ubiquitous plaque. This model is a replica referring to the constant re-presentation and glorification of banal information. With specific reference to the Guinness Book of Records it depicted an extract from the ‘longest traffic jam in the world’ made entirely of model cars. The emphasis within the work is the dialogue between fiction and reality: the artificial becomes ‘more real’ than the truth: the truth becomes impossible to separate from the myth surrounding it.

A small artist publication accompanied the exhibition.

Exhibition supported by Scottish Arts Council and Edinburgh College of Art.

Anna Ray, Bad Blood, detail, cotton, wadding, bells, 2001

Helen Stringfellow, 0 - 60, installation detail, 2001

Karen Loughridge, Fantasy Island series, inkjet print, 2001