Contemporary art gallery with white walls, brown carpeted floor, and fluorescent lighting. Two framed digital artworks are on the walls; one on the left shows a girl in a room with an older woman, and one on the right shows a scene with a girl and a
An art gallery with a framed contemporary painting of a child standing in a dimly lit room with a woman sitting on a couch.
An art gallery with a photograph of an unclothed woman on a white wall, a sculpture of a female torso on a marble pedestal, and a pink-lit corner.
Two framed art pieces in a white-walled art gallery, one depicting a child standing in a dimly lit room with a woman seated, and the other showing a child's play scene through a window with a brick exterior.
An art gallery with white walls and a brown carpeted floor. On the right wall, there is a large framed photograph of a person reclining on a purple armchair in a dark room. On the floor, a textured pedestal holds a plastic bottle filled with orange l
Two framed photographs hanging on a white gallery wall, with a wooden floor and minimal lighting.
An art gallery with a framed photograph on a white wall showing a woman lying on a pink chair with a blue background. A pedestal with a textured surface holds a bottle with an orange liquid and a straw.

In this richly imagined articulation of all the strangeness and anxiety of our present moment, SCARLETT meditates on the new intensities of domesticity, motherhood and isolation, and the uneasy blend of immediacy and distance that has become the hallmark of lockdown. On the one hand, a world that has become virtual, mediated by the numbing electric glow of phone and TV screens; on the other, the crushing inescapability of four walls and a toddler screaming at 2 AM. The exhibition is presented immersive installation including sculptural, photographic and sensory works, transforming the gallery into a space that resonates with this confounding contradiction.

The madonna and child re-imagined in a suburban living room, sunk into a plush leather armchair, bathing in the blue light of advertising’s stylised plenitude and the sticky panacea of strawberry-pink paracetamol. These are some of the keynotes of SCARLETT’s reflections on motherhood as exacerbated by Covid-19. Pumped up on sucrose, stuck in a glass box – energy and torpor. Wanting opposites at once. As the artist herself puts it: ‘craving mess and chaos, craving control; feeling shackled, feeling free; feeling safe and vulnerable; feeling weak and empowered; feeling bored and madly excited; feeling alone’. A life lived within these contradictions is at the core of SCARLETT’S rendition of the transcendent, exhausted mother: life-giver and energy source figured by the sculpture of a lactating torso at the centre of the exhibition. And the ‘living’ room is where it all happens – the beach of the present, with the horizon always in view.

A sense of being ‘contained’ or ‘framed’ in various ways at once – within a swelling body, an armchair, a front room or a maternal bond – is key to SCARLETT’S work. The subjects of her photographs, like the visitor to the gallery space, are framed in a meticulously rendered domestic setting where comfort has become itchy, safety oppressive: a world of only interiors. Thick carpets and soft furnishings play to the sense of suffocation within our seamless ‘bubbles’, as well as the frustrating collapse of tactility suggested by that term. Glowing pixels out of shot suggest some ephemeral means of escape, even if it’s just visual anaesthesia. The tonality of the work, meanwhile, captures a screen-addict sense of impending apocalypse lurking beyond the frame, haunting this apparently most anodyne of settings with a threat of further catastrophe to come. It’s a critical and urgent reply to the conditions to which we’ve become accustomed, if not reconciled.

Exhibition text by Nick Waplington