As anyone who toured the recent fine art degree shows will know, Hayley Tompkins’s methodology – provocatively disparate clusters of objects and images that say, in effect, ‘make sense of me!’ – is thoroughly voguish. She does it particularly well, though. Consider one wall-based collation, arranged with deceptive informality: a photograph of a hand with four fingers raised, four casual photographic studies of plants, a stretched rectangle of cloth with five separate tags sewn on to it, a blue-painted spanner. On a first circuit of the show, a tentative structure arises through bursts of repetition: other hand-painted tools, dismembered segments of clothing (shirtsleeves, etc), photographs (of batteries, repeatedly).
But then the publicity materials assert that these are actually portraits – of a figure interacting with its immediate environs – and matters turn at once more concrete and more delicate. If this is an abstracted personality on display, the borderline between internal and external is blurry: batteries may represent some vitalising spirit, or just be batteries; a knife and wadded cubes of paper perhaps suggest a spirit of testiness. But that’s conjecture.
Tompkins, in offering a funky and dishevelled update of intimism (those interior scenes of domestic bliss beloved of Bonnard and Vuillard), also seems to ponder subjectivity’s incommunicability: what could be meticulously precise correlatives of experience might, equally, be knowingly imperfect translations. Refusal of clarification makes for anxiety, but the offbeat voluptuousness that Tompkins coaxes from her collided textures offsets it.