Night Garden

Night Garden is an ongoing series of surreal snapshots which speaks to the uncanny through nature and femininity. Staged within a nocturnal world which is both fecund and stagnant- forms unfurl, sink and glisten in a void like space. The female body recurs as a motif throughout. Fetishistic materials - sheer nylon, glow-mesh and latex - merge with the organic, creating a rich network of symbolic association.

The artists use their own bodies, devoid of any markers of identity, so that what comes through are faceless apparitions of the female form or ‘reproductive body’. At times statue-like, at times creaturely, it becomes hard to separate the material from the corporeal and the human from the non-human.

A pregnant latex clad body emerges from milky white waters suggesting something clinical and sterile. Whilst appearing hard and shiny the red body is also taut, ripe as fruit, humming with a deep carnal energy contained within.

These constructed images of the body are paired with various detail shots- a painted bud, an earthworm contorted into a love heart, a butterfly which appears to be in flight but is in fact dead. The non-human and ‘other’ become imbued with the same emotionality as the uncanny female figures. In ‘Night Garden’ Long and Stent offer up a sensorial world of their own making for the viewer to drift in and out of.