Name All Your Pets, 2017

“Is it a teaching aid? A cautionary tale? Maybe there’s something about a weird how-to manual.” Many of the depictions in Tom Woolner’s works have the clarity and directness of diagrams, without the discernible lessons. ‘Name all your pets’ hangs on the wall with classical formality, with a glass pane, but it also slips into caricature with its gloopy edges and joins. Inside too there’s a composed oddness, which follows its own apparent logic.