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The long toothed familiar scuttles about us, incessantly gnawing on some old timber or ancient boot, awakening our senses to the opaque realms that surround our routines. Its restless visitations draw attention to vacancy; a place beyond a wall, a cavity within a room, a hypnogogic dark, fizzy with habits and indecision. Shifting between dusty voids, the slippery black creature embodies the invisible, an emergent plane that roams and draws the eye. Unfigurable, monstrous, unidentifiable patches that have closed computational powers, whirring and doggedly working away in the margins and spiritual middens of our conceptions of space.

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Paying homage to the increasingly endangered and infamous black rat, the two bodies of work come together, exposed and re-assembled, in a very different space to which they were conjured. Ross Taylor and Janes Haid-Schmallenberg spent the lock down enwrapped in a Covid-bookclub-swap-shop, wandering between multi narrated novels born from the chaos of post reformist Peasant Wars to rodent led inter-dimensional travel, and within these interests the artists became aware of a mutually employed narrator. A Blind Passenger, an illusory somnambulist that appears only to disappear, communicating solely by the aid of two bodies. A feral and savage grotesque, that in turn gives form to endogenous creations and the non-human sensations that the artist-spy whispers.

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The characters and the settings portrayed in this exhibition are taking part in shift-work. They have become synced to rather older subcortical structures, which loop and spin and re-order the sub-conscious, caught in a cycle of temporal resurrection and a passage between calm and frenzy. And so the gnawing continues, as does the making. With claws, and with teeth, the walls become a dual sphere of production and feasting, where all that enters is incessantly chewed, mulched and regurgitated.

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