The work of Annabel Elgar inhabits a more elaborate and
gothic world of storytelling. Narrative here is not something that has
been pared away but something that has been embellished and layered. The
stories that lie behind these pictures are ones that extend back into
a dark folk memory. Elements of legend, fairy tale and historical anecdote
jostle with hack journalism, urban myth and B-movie storylines. The scenarios
that emerge from this process of allegorical bricolage are ones that we
instinctively recognize because, baroque though they might be, we encounter
them every day in our newspapers and televisions and at night-time we
visit them again in our dreams. Annabel Elgar's sources are more mythic than literary
or art historical, but they also operate through the sense of a shared
set of scripts. Her carefully designed sets are sets for plays that will
never be fully dramatised and whose full story will never be known: the
actors may never appear within the frame- and if they do they will probably
be looking the other way, their faces invariably hidden. The props have
been carefully chosen to produce an endless proliferation of narrative
choices, artfully posed between the fairytale and the everyday. The key
characters in her half-told stories inhabit houses that we faintly recognise
but they are clearly deranged and obsessive, dressing up in strange costumes,
waiting for parties that will never happen, tying themselves up in the
curtains, playing with ventriloquists' dummies, or setting the garden
shed alight. Elgar inserts a bleak Orwellian vision of sad bedsits,
neglected kitchens and subterranean basements into a folkloric scenery
of suspiciously lush green fields, tangled gardens and dark forests. If
the uncanny is characterised by a sense of the unfamiliar suddenly revealing
itself within the familiar, then it is surely Elgar's photographs that
most effectively work at binding these two senses together. In her case
she uses the conventions of staged photography to knit them together materially,
arranging the objects in her pictures into enigmatic compositions that
resist any clear resolution. The stories that Elgar relates to us are cross-cut by
familiar themes: madness and sadness and badness all have their role to
play in these scenarios. In these stories the struggles between the rich
and the poor are relentless and eternal, the home is a place of poverty
and ruin, the family a potential site of treachery and despair.
|
![]() |