The evolution of human intellect and material existence can be traced through the endurance of the artefacts left behind. Objects that populate the artwork in ‘Fictions’ span many centuries and continental distances through the global products of manufacture and culture to accumulate in Clough’s drawings and Young’s expanded field practice, in an interplay that no longer binds objects to their birthplace or taxonomy.

Drawing and assemblage as an engine for the imagination allows
for the ordering (or reordering) of spaces and things. Draftsmanship
in Clough and Young’s work functions as a hypothesis weaving
fictional realities and postulating invented worlds. The stitched
threads of Clough’s perspectivally sewn transcriptions construct a fabrication where artefacts are combined, hybridized, compressed,
into a singularity that levels the hierarchical value of things. Clough’s speculative drawings remain intangible and unsculpted where neither the original, nor the outcome will ever exist. For this exhibition Young scavenges trash and the discarded by-products of consumption to reference gendered divisions of domestic space. Young’s works are geolocated in an autobiographical narrative to move room by room through the lived experience of uprootedness, gaslighting and imposed fictions associated with the social, political and economic functions and dynamics of the domestic interior.

Both artists inhabit the inert and hand-crafted universe of the still life: one of nearness, confinement, entombment – where the detritus of the everyday accumulates as captives in a labyrinthine mausoleum. ‘Fictions’ is an exhibition mimetic of a Wunderkammer construction of the mind. Here a narrative and re-imagining multiplies in a space of acute scrutiny, subsumed by the production of artifice and fiction.