‘‘There is No Why’, Alida Sayer’s current show (Marsden Woo Gallery, ends 31 July) takes its title from a line in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: ‘Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’ Distorting simple typography in layered wall-pieces and projections, Sayer’s work traps quotations from Vonnegut’s brilliant novel in surreal three-dimensional vortexes.

She describes her work as follows: ‘In this body of work, inspired by the novel Slaughterhouse-Five … I use projections, printing and hand-cutting processes to explore the question of how we visualise time. The stacking or layering of paper and perspex are just some of the creative strategies I use to communicate a simultaneous vision of past, present and future: a three-dimensional approach to distilling the essence of a four-dimensional universe.’

Top: ‘Here we are II’, detail.

Below: ‘Here we are I and II’

Above: ‘All moments’

Below: ‘All moments’, detail

Above: ‘There is no beginning’

Below: ‘They couldn’t imagine’

Above: ‘The creatures were friendly’

> 31 July 2010
Alida Sayer: ‘There is No Why’
Marsden Woo Gallery
17-18 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DN
http://marsdenwoo.com/

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