‘Beyond the Shadow’, The Custard Factory, Digbeth, Birmingham and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham. (1994)

‘Beyond the Shadow’ is a simple dichotomy between form and content. The work intentionally deals with certain paramount and abiding preoccupation with ritual, death and regeneration. The sculptures and photographs in the show are intended as metaphors for meaning and understanding; a deliberate dislocation and manipulation of objects/materials in a predefined space. This manipulation reveals a kind of truth.

The elegiac nature of the work is a reflection of the experience of self-loss, the acceptance of which has led to a new found creativity; a state of grace born out of the awareness of absence, or ‘the lack’. Psychoanalysis argues that in our formulation as human subjects, we become only as we are marked by loss and lack. The work reflects this state of being however transient or momentary. The tension between illusion and reality underscores the work as a whole: transient images appear static and immutable. Memories become fragmented layers. The sense of fear experienced in this attempt to make my mark demonstrates a shift, a step sideways from my previous practice. Inevitably there is an accompanying sense of loss. However, through this body of work the fear can be said to have been overcome, something has been conjured out of the shadows.

Anne Lydiat, 1994

The repetition of a formal sequence of elements, an insistence on truth to materials, and a severe restriction of colour, place these works squarely within the principles of minimalism. What preserves them from the kind of sterility into which such a gallery bound aesthetic can sometimes fall, is a constant dialogue between the meaning and making of the pieces. By using vernacular objects that belong in the sphere of everyday life, the subject of Lydiat’s sculptures and installations are accessible to a wide audience and yet, simultaneously, they are distanced through their immaculate reconstruction as art.

The greenhouses are conceived in the form of a flexible installation made up of sculptural structures which exist both as solid three-dimensional objects and dislocated forms in space. Initially at least, form and content seem to be divorced. The work evokes a series of formal tensions, between instability and order, dislocation and placing movement and stasis, and between sculpture and painting.  Yet again, ‘common or garden’ objects have been defamiliarized and rendered strange.  A greenhouse which should signify. A place of light, warmth and growth is in one case covered with lead, in a second with reflecting mirror glass, and in a third is shuttered with blank panels of plywood and then turned upside down on its roof.  A fourth, painted white, hangs on the wall, deconstructed in two dimensions, its disparate parts have yet to be assembled, like a plan waiting final placement.

Inversion and deconstruction offer a key to a kind of reversal of meaning which operates in these pieces. The ‘greenhouses’ are enclosed spaces that we are unable to enter, sealed off from the light they seem sterile and impenetrable, and yet they contain emotion, in the dual sense of that which is both repressed and concealed from view. Absence of growth and fertility stand in for loss in the creative sense. This dialogue between an inner life and the life of objects, the personal and the formal, remains a central theme of her current work.

Rosemary Betterton (1996)