A stained glass window looks both into and out of a church. John the Baptist, bright and transparent, looks in at the rows of people, their kneeling and praying, their repeated gestures. He looks out at the same people walking their dogs and mowing their lawns. In his coloured glass eye, these rhythms overlap and interlock.

Annie Whiles’ work likewise explores a relationship between the drama and ritual she encountered as a child in the Anglican church and her own agnostic and parochial day-to-day life. A tension forms here between public and private activity, between ordinary and extraordinary event (a pair of iron tongs can be used to turn logs in a fire or to remove a martyr’s tongue.)

Paul Virilio talks about ‘picnolepsy’: a disappearance or tiny epileptic episode and it’s potential to hold time. Whiles’ objects and images speak of these moments or lacunae. The poet Lavinia Greenlaw has described how the meticulous scrutiny of the still life painter can transfigure his subject, leaving it “divested of meaning and restored to strangeness”: Whiles’ work seems to reach toward the same empty place, where we encounter a vacuum brimming with something ineffable. She talks about “the spell of these moments”. In woodcarvings, giant embroidered badges, drawn & collaged imagery and film, Whiles considers how the experience of these picnoleptic events might become manifest in an object or image, which might itself have potential as a horoscope or sign, a glimpse into another place located within a waking slumber.

Lee Triming 2009