"In love at eight with Othello’s Desdemona. On our strawberry iMac I draw her massive soprano body tightly folded in a blue silk dress. No images of the play to be found anywhere, this was before the internet. And at bedtime I tell him dragons don’t exist, fear the real world instead."

Dorine van Meel presents Between the Dog and the Wolf as her first solo show in a public gallery, featuring new work made during six months as the Nina Stewart Artist-in-Residence in the SLG’s Outset Artists’ Flat. The exhibition in the SLG’s first floor galleries features a multi-channel installation exploring language and female subjectivity, through a soundtrack of two female narrators combined with alternating projections of digital imagery.

Between the Dog and the Wolf, introduces two disembodied voices which resonate around the gallery as they deliver fragments of scripts. Memories of falling in love, reflections on female friendships, apprehensions of giving birth, visions of a mother and grandmother, and thoughts on feminist writings, are framed by the narrators’ observations of their surroundings and daily routines. At the centre of the room two video projections meet on one double-faced screen, the computer-generated imagery creating fast moving, abstract patterns that follow the rhythm of the voices. The effect is an immersive atmosphere of sound and light, which encourages the viewer to consider their own position and subjective experience within the space.

Van Meel’s practice is situated within and between the media of moving image, sculpture and installation. Expanding the moving image beyond its frame, she sets up relationships between the work, exhibition space and viewer – both of an experiential and affective kind. Drawing on stories, histories, personal experiences and observations of day-to-day reality, fragmented narratives and forms of subjectivity are constructed through an interplay of voices and signs.

To accompany her exhibition Van Meel is producing a collaboratively authored publication entitled Some Place of Avoiding an Animal, which brings together a group of young artists and writers; John Archibald Harrington, Emma Bennett, Jesse Darling, Susanna Davies-Crook, Kati Kärki, Claire Potter, Erica Scourti and Dorine van Meel, to explore the ways in which specific use of language and words can create a sense of space, time, class and cultural identity. The publication was initiated by a series of group writing workshops led by guest artists including Pil and Galia, Melissa Gordon and Michael Dean.

Dorine Van Meel (b. 1984, NL) completed her MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2014, after graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2010. Selected exhibitions include; a duo exhibition at Kunstraum, London (forthcoming); The Things We Talked About, group exhibition at St PAUL St Gallery, Auckland (11 June - 17 July, 2015); Wilderness, group exhibition at New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen (17 April - 23 May, 2015); …instead to meet strangers who might change our minds, solo exhibition at the Swiss Church, London (2014); A Space of No Exception, group exhibition at Sokol Space, Moscow (2014). Van Meel has curated the group exhibition Luminous Flux at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam (2014) and is the initiator of Does Not Equal, a collaborative project on the creative potential and ongoing concerns of feminism at W139 in Amsterdam (13 March - 12 April, 2015).