“The way the mark-making happens makes me think about bodies or my own body”. Hands, feet, intestine-like fleshy shapes often appear in Tom Woolner’s work, and do so with an allusion to a narrative. ‘Internal Weather (Gift)’ has a baby-smooth surface of chalky pastel tones, which gives the work all the delicate beauty of a meticulously extracted fresco. Little wonder this fantastical and absurd object takes on a tantalising authority.

There’s something about pretence in Tom Woolner’s work: the frame looks robust and rock-like, but it’s also created using materials a prop-maker might use; the work hangs with classical formality, but slips into caricature with its gloopy edges. Inside, the sleeting rain is frozen in a microsecond, but it’s a familiar, endless moment. Whatever spirited narrative this depiction might be part of, there’s a pervasive sense of everything and nothing happening all at once.

“Sometimes you sit there and wonder, what’s happening in there?” One of the things about Tom Woolner’s wall sculptures is that you’re often not sure if you’re looking in or looking out. This fleshy ovoid could be a microscopic view down a bodily canal, or it could be a frame of a dream or tale. The rain comes down with incessant regularity… and it feels like we’re caught in a looped moment. Perhaps the big narrative is more a perpetual feeling.

“The way the mark-making happens makes me think about bodies or my own body… you sit and wonder, what’s happening in there?” The wooden hut with a puffing chimney would be straight out of a quaint children’s story, were it not cocooned inside a fleshy organ. Folklore meets anatomical study, embedded in light-industrial rock formations.

Sitting proudly off the wall, with brittle edges and chiselled backs, many of Tom Woolner’s works hang like relics mined from the vestiges of some buried civilisation. This is particularly the case with ‘A Cause by Propagation’, which features a pair of legs planted firmly on what could be a theatre stage. There’s something stoic and emblematic here, but also joyfully whimsical.

“The way the mark-making happens makes me think about bodies or my own body… you sit and wonder, what’s happening in there?” ‘Internal Weather (Voyage)’ encapsulates a number of the narrative conundrums that span Tom Woolner’s works… a rowing boat bobbing on the sea would be straight out of a quaint children’s story, were it not cocooned inside a fleshy organ. Absurd anatomical study meets folklore… depicted with all the beauty of a meticulously extracted fresco.

For all the classical characteristics we can draw from Tom Woolner’s works, they never resolve in any enlightened sense. The works often seem like episodes from a cartoon, or, particularly with this work, a theatre stage or layers of a child’s diorama. And more often than not, they’re mischievous: two giant feet emerging from the clouds, like the descent of a clumsy god. If there’s wisdom in here it’s more joyfully surreal.

For all the classical characteristics we can draw from Tom Woolner’s works (they hang like preserved frescos) they never resolve in any enlightened sense. And while the images form into the logic of their own compositions, they’re often mischievous: a plank inserted into what seems to be a heap of intestines, like a wafer in an ice cream – if there’s wisdom in here it’s more joyfully surreal.

For all the classical characteristics we can draw from Tom Woolner’s works (they hang like preserved frescoes) they never resolve in any enlightened sense. They’re often mischievous, and just as with Woolner’s performances, they’re sometimes grotesque or rude or slap-stick. If there’s wisdom in here it’s more joyfully surreal.

“At the core of my work is letting the materials lead me. Without this chance encounter of certain materials doing their thing they perhaps wouldn’t have settled on being so anatomical”. Many of Tom Woolner’s works repeat elements that remind us of body parts or organs, and this lattice could be tendons stretched across the frame, like a fleshy leaded window. The works are often encased by inviting, ornate frames, which tempt us into readings of the spaces and non-spaces within.