Brutal Dream, 2024 at The Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City

18 May – 2 June 2024

Brutal Dream was a solo exhibition of new work produced on receipt of a Broadway Gallery bursary awarded following the Letchworth Open Exhibition in 2023.

Inspired by ideas drawn from the space between utopian visions and dystopian futures in science fiction and novels such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1888) and Concrete Island by JG Ballard (1974), her work situates itself between objects excavated from the future and a grainy and crackling analogue world all around us. In fact, Bellamy’s novel said to have inspired Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City vision for Letchworth, has been a recent focus in making a new body of work. The interest here lies partially in what connects the protagonist’s experiences in both novels; a sense of disquieting dislocation, of place and time and of lost future visions; the tension between a stasis and sense of time having moved on unnoticed. In terms of sculptural and photographic processes, it is the way in which objects and surfaces may be able to convey these ideas, allowing the thinking to emerge through the process of making.

“I like to imagine the work as hovering somewhere in the realm of archaeological sci-fi, a kind of excavation of potentially lost futures. It’s the sort of space, which oscillates between two and three dimensions; fragments of things and some kind of feeling of texture or colour, which emerge out of barely remembered dreams. There is a kind of glimpse or sense of something tangible, structurally solid, yet on the point of collapse at the same time.”

For the exhibition, Brutal Dreams, she has created a new body of work, aiming to exploring further where her experimental photographic and sculptural practices merge.

The sculptures and experimental photographic works explore visual and conceptual patterns and parallels between hyperlocal experiences in the everyday and imaginative visions aligned with of Modernist ideals, set within her interest in science fiction and ‘lost futures’[1].

Alongside the exhibition, Fairchild collaborated with two artists Acoustic Survey (aka Jakub Rokita) and FLOMO (Rob Flint) in a live audio visual performance loosely structured in three parts around three modernist buildings designed by architect Erno Goldfinger; Willow Road; Metro Central & Trellick Tower.

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[1] Fisher, M, Ghosts of my Life, 2014, UK