Nancy Farmer Exhibition
at Orbital Comics Gallery
21-27 March 2010
In her first solo exhibition in London, Somerset artist Nancy Farmer will be showing her paintings at Orbital Comics Gallery. The exhibition, titled “Monstrous Affairs” is an irreverent and tongue-in-cheek mixture of fantasy and real-life. Her art re-tells many a familiar tale in unfamiliar ways, balancing elements drawn from fairytale and mythology, reality and satire, with a humour that appeals to a remarkably wide audience.
Well-known in Somerset, Nancy has exhibited and sold paintings both nationally and internationally, and this is the first time a large group of her work has been shown in London.
Nancy will be in the gallery for the duration of her exhibition and will be available to talk to anyone curious about her artwork. The exhibition will offer original artworks for sale, along with a selection of prints. Admission is free.
The venue, now Orbital Comics, was The Photographers Gallery for about 40 years, and still retains a large gallery space, in addition to being a comic bookshop. This is no random choice for Nancy to show her artwork, as for the last 2 years she has regularly illustrated for the publication “Murky Depths”, a quarterly anthology of “graphically dark speculative fiction”, which appears amongst Orbital’s extensive collection of titles. Nancy’s illustrations for Murky Depths will be on display during the exhibition alongside her ‘fine art’ paintings.
Coinciding with the last day of Nancy’s exhibition, Sunday 27th, author / artist Luke Cooper will also be appearing at Orbital, to sign copies of his new graphic novel “A Glimpse Of Hell – The Dark Gospel”, containing stories published in Murky Depths, Portent Comics, and some previously unpublished material; “a brutal blend of crime and horror with ballistic action, buckets of gore and a dark sense of humour” is promised. Though temperamentally very different, Nancy Farmer’s and Luke Cooper’s work has much subject matter in common: demons and angels trail though many a picture and we often meet the unfamiliar in a familiar setting. A wine bar populated by demons is a common enough problem to both artists, it seems.
Sullen fairies, belligerent demons and other curious monsters - dark, whimsical contemporary art, all with a satirical edge and a twist of humour – Nancy Farmer’s paintings could be mistaken for fantasy art – but this is not quite accurate, rather, she holds a murky and distorted mirror up to ordinary life.
Her characters resonate with modern-day decadences - the fairies are delinquent; the devils bored, half-heartedly persecuting the Dammed merely because it is their job to do so; the guardian angel is fat and indolent, her rose-tinted spectacles shielding any wrong-doing from her 'watchful' eyes. A sad, lost gentleman is found in a bar full of curious demons, but refuses to leave and admit he’s in the wrong place, while the smartly dressed devil is equally on edge in a rather tacky wine bar full of ‘ordinary’ people. Here are monsters and demons, certainly, but here are also our colleagues, friends and relations, and it is often uncertain quite which are which.
About the title of the exhibition Nancy says, “ ‘Monstrous Affairs’ might refer to some unusual couples who turn up in my pictures. There is a princess who fails to kiss her over-sized frog because she prefers frogs to princes, and there is the elegant Mrs Minotaur with her hairy partner. But it could also mean ‘The affairs of Monsters’ - their general day-to-day domestic activities.”
