Laura Beaumont: Bleed Between the Lines at the Cob Gallery

An Emmy award-winning animation writer, Laura Beaumont is clearly no stranger to telling stories, and her Lilliputian Bleed Between the Lines is a wonderfully dark satire, commenting on the construction of fiction versus the reality of life.

The exhibition features antiquarian books carved up and fitted with microcosmic freeze frame images using miniature figurines. The pieces hang from the walls, surrounding a centrepiece of the creation process: A writing desk, encircled by torn-up books, which have been stabbed apart by scissors and hedge-cutters. This is the artist’s very own theatre, the focal point of the room is the fabrication of the art itself. The noise of a typewriter hammers out continually in the background; The most significant part of the exhibition is the creation of the exhibition.

The juxtaposition of story versus reality begins fittingly on entering, with a trio of Enid Blyton novels. Blyton represents fiction at its peak, a children’s author who created some of the most fantastical and idyllic literature in history, her novels are the perfect way to create a stark opening. One of the pieces The Mystery of the Secret Room shows children searching happily for the room in question, whilst hidden below them is a scene of stripper-fuelled debauchery. This theme is carried on in the main gallery, where we’re presented with The Last Days of Pompeii: the collapse of civilisation is portrayed with a man sitting on a toilet while lava flies around him. Cake Making is illustrated by an obese man, enshrined by a picture of human internal organs; the words “lard”, “dripping” and “rolled” jump out of the text that surrounds him.

The last in the series and perhaps the most poignant reverses the trend: the vignette here shows a happy family looking at their pet rabbits, whilst the book encasing them instructs us on the correct method to gut a rabbit for dinner.

The work is a cut-throat reminder of the harshness of real life, indeed the very object used to create the art, a scalpel, signifies a bloody and mortal approach to the dissection. The exhibit is in the Cob Gallery in Camden, a fitting place if there ever was one to discover the “subtext of human interaction”.

Amelia Hopkins

Laura Beaumont: Bleed Between the Lines is at the Cob Gallery from 18^th November until 5^th December 2015, for further information visit here.