Wild Interior, Suky Best’s solo show, features a series a short looping films using animation and collages. While the recent work concentrates on our ambiguous relationship to nature, the newest work deals with more surreal worlds.
Suky Best has a long-running fascination with the clash occasioned by encounters between well-groomed domestic interiors and nature run wild. These interests and strategies are evident in the animations and collages shown here in Wild Interior; in many of the works, birds inhabit domestic interiors, the rightful owners of the space long before they were enclosed into buildings. The humans only exist as invisible inhabitants.
Alwyn Park House (2011) is modeled on the form of the toy theatre, with its stack of printed cardboard flats that recede from the eye and between which figures can emerge and disappear. The house is a composite, constructed from photos of furniture and household effects found in stately home catalogues. The rooms have become fictional historic spaces; as we fly through each room, they lead impossibly to each other defying laws of real space.
In At Betty’s House (2012) the quantity of information is further reduced, so that an environment somewhere between a room and its plan and elevation is realized. The spaces are constructed from a combination of images of real and doll’s houses. With the floors beneath carpets removed, they project assertively into the void that separates it from the viewer, and throughout the piece the removal of information, combined with the way we fey through the spaces and between objects, generates multiple ambiguities and conflicts of scale. For Best the work ‘refers to the interior spaces of computer games and their first person point of view’, and although the piece is structured loosely round alternating views of corridors and object groupings, the whole is constructed as a continuous fly-through.
In 54 Morning Lane (2011) owls invade a house, disrupting each scene. It is unclear if the inhabitants are aware of their existence. The owls seem only to appear during scenes of heightened emotion, through gaps in space. All are trapped in uncomfortable proximity. This is also the case in An Observation of Flight (2010), in which a Peregrine Falcon’s movements is seen in silhouette, constrained and observed within an enclosing rotating glass box. This box is marked as if for scientific observation.
Suky Best is an artist based in London. Working with animation, print and installation, she has exhibited nationally and internationally. Commissioned works include, Early Birds, an Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 in association with Arts Council England, recently included in Extinct at the Natural History Museum, London; About Running, a moving image commission for The Great North Run; Stone Voices, a permanent sculptural piece for the Devils Glen in Ireland; From the Archive, an animation for the main reception area of University College Hospital London; The Park in Winter, Arts Council England’s online Christmas card 2008 and Horses for Great Ormond Street Hospital. She was included in Assembly at Tate Britain, and has exhibited at the Baltic Gateshead and Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain and has had solo exhibitions and publications, including The Return of the Native at Pump House Gallery London. In 2005 she completed a Wellcome Trust funded SCIART project, making animations for hospital outpatient areas. She was Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Wolverhampton (funded by the Henry Moore Foundation) 1998-2000, and has completed an MPhil research degree at the Royal College of Art London, investigating the relationships between birds and film.