Twofold In Nottingham

The Hand in Heart gallery in Nottingham is a small contemporary space run by gallerist Richard Install, who, at only 22, is interested in using the gallery to provide a platform for other emerging artists, curators and writers. The gallery's current show Twofold brings together the work of emerging artists Lucinda Chua, recently featured on Channel 4's photography competition Picture This, and Marianna Simnett, nominated for the 2008Jerwood Moving Image Award.

Simnett's dual-screen animation catches and then implicates its audience in the doomed and repetitive cycle of its parrot protagonist. The vocal and visual mimicry and multiple layering of the characters' monotonous task leaves the viewer with a sense of endless struggle, and an acute awareness of the painstaking intricacy of Simnett's own undertaking.

Chua is a storyteller who suggests complicated and lengthy narratives shown in a split-second scene, whilst pointedly stressing the ephemeral nature of what the single image is capable of portraying. In her Double Portraits series, Chua constructs new shared contexts for photographs that have been taken independently: usually combining two formal portraits into single images in which a series of fictitious exchanges and gestures are suggested.

Following this theme of duality, The Woodgates, from her Woman and Child series, uses a similar device to imply a particular moment in a story which is suggested but never revealed.

Chua's and Simnett's works make an interesting oppositional pairing. Their concern with reflecting the substance of their respective mediums provides an additional aspect of duality to the Twofold show. The painstaking nature of hand-illustrated animation is clearly reflected in Simnett's cyclical work, whilst Chua's notion of the transient nature of the snapshot is an ideal antithesis to this. Running from the 29th April until 19th May, Twofold shows a refined selection of contemporary work from two of the brightest young artists currently working in the United Kingdom: Simnett and Chua are names we will certainly hear more about in the future.