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.

“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.

“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.

There’s something about pretence in Tom Woolner’s work. Here, the frame looks robust and rock-like, but it’s also created using materials a prop-maker might use. It 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, with interlocking shapes that hang with their own apparent logic.

“The way the mark-making happens leads me to think about bodies or maybe my own body. But who knows what comes first in that? Maybe whimsically you sit in a hospital waiting room for two hours and you start thinking, ‘I wonder what’s happening in there’. Is there a little boat bobbing along? Is there a weather system or a climate passing?” These chance encounters of forms and thoughts build layers of unique narratives… part anatomical study, part absurd fable.

The ‘chair people’ have been an ever-present theme throughout Shenstone’s career: “The chair dwells in a historical world. Everyone who has sat in it has left some kind of memory in the chair. It lives through time and accommodates people who want to use it, and that ingratiates it to me.” Chair and person are intertwined as a single sinuous being, each with their own affable character and seemingly straddling the real and non-physical world. These works unfold with hits of drama, of humour, the macabre, of pain, and all sorts of fleshy humanness in between. We’re all in there somewhere.