ANGELA LANE, CLARE MILLEDGE

A false awakening is the dream of having woken, the moment the sleeping mind convinces itself it hasreturned to the world. It is fitting ground for these two artists, whose works hold the viewer in a state ofenchantment and disorientation, somewhere between waking and dreaming. Both look past the surface ofthe natural world, and both ask us to see from somewhere other than ourselves.

Angela Lane paints postcard-size landscapes in oil on birch plywood, aligning herself with the art historicaltradition of depicting celestial and mysterious phenomena. Softly lit scenes veiled in fog are offset bydramatic twin suns, eclipses and fire-struck colours that seem not to belong to this earth. Informed byrecorded accounts of unexplained meteorological events from the early medieval period and channelledthrough automatism, her imagined landscapes feel at once close and far from reach. Their intimate scaledraws the viewer close, offering a portal into another dimension, a world observed with otherworldlycuriosity. Blurred light and shifting focus suspend time and place, inviting us to consider a non-humanperspective and to ponder the divine power of nature. The result is a compelling sense of drama and solitude,an escape from the passage of time.

Clare Milledge presents a suite of her idiosyncratic hinterglasmalerei paintings, a reverse-glass techniquerooted in Byzantine traditions, alongside a large-scale textile piece. Her inverted order of mark-makingproduces luminous, stratified surfaces that frustrate depth and resist narrative closure. Drawing onmythology, lore and environmental science, Milledge reimagines contemporary environments througha polymorphic visual language. In False Awakening she draws on current bodies of structural power andthe tools they employ such as surveillance, doublespeak and mystical symbolism. Her use of found textgathered from the constant chat and commentary of social media, media, gaming and blog platforms, worksaccumulatively rather than explanatorily, refusing hierarchy and operating as a rhythmical accompanyingtrack. Inherited materials such as an old mist net used in ecological surveys, are combined with dentalmirrors and sculpted bronze to produce drone-like mystical amulets suspended in dark clouds. Set into theseand into her zoomorphic bronze clasps (or close-readers), are tiny gems and forms of owls, fangs, cranes, asnail and micro bats, so that the act of looking becomes itself an act of close-reading.

Together, Milledge and Lane summon a world of disorientation, delay and disturbance, governed by poeticlogic rather than certainty. False Awakening is an invitation to look again, and to question what we take thenatural world, and our place in it, to be.