Tessa Farmer, The Terror (detail) 2006. © the artist

Paul Dance takes a trip down to Colchester and encounters an intriguing trio of artists.

firstSite Gallery in Colchester is playing host to three exciting artists, each working in three different styles and media.

In the main galleries Tessa Farmer and Hiraki Sawa continue the gallery’s reputation for high quality work from around the globe with two shows that run until May 6 2006. The artist’s space plays host to Amanda Ansell who will be developing her work there until April 22 2006.

Tessa Farmer’s The Terror is a series of suspended pieces that use parts of insects, tiny twigs, animal skeletons and roots to create a gothic world where sinister skeletal fairies ride the backs of dead insects.

My first thoughts on seeing the show were of the circular nature of life; the skeletons attack the beetles and wasps, the wasps in turn attack and kill the birds thus creating the skeletons - there is no beginning and no end.

Her current work expands on her undergraduate and MA work, which saw her selected for New Contemporaries in 2004, but it’s slightly bigger – she had used about 60 12mm fairies, now the fairies have been scaled down to about 7mm.

Hiraki Sawa, Dwelling 2002. © the artist

“They used to just fight amongst themselves, now they are using the insects to do battle and to build battleships from,” she explained. “I’m not even sure if they ever die, there are a lot of things I still have to find out about them.”

I look forward to discovering the details of these complex little lives; these pieces are exquisite, scary and endlessly fascinating. Charles Saatchi bought one of them from the New Contemporaries show 2004 and is thought to be showing it in the new Saatchi Gallery planned for Chelsea.

There are countless possibilities within this work and the revelation that Tessa is discovering rather than making her fairy world adds to the mystique.

I first saw Haraki Sawa at the Size Matters exhibition in Norwich Castle and Art Gallery a couple of months ago where he showed one small installation called The Dwelling. This depicted the inside of a flat in which tiny aeroplanes took off, landed and gradually occupied the airspace until they seemed like the rightful occupants.

His exhibition at firstSite, Certain Places, includes this piece but expands on the idea with five other specially developed works on a similar theme. Sawa has said his work is about travelling without leaving a place and also about his own feelings of alienation on arriving in Britain from Japan and a period of living in London flats.

There is a fantastic dream-like quality about the pieces. Rocking horses swim in the bath while line-drawn horses and camels canter across the walls. Elsewhere goats rise up from drawings on the floor and walk off across the carpet.

Amanda Ansell, Castle. © the artist

These films offer a magical transformation of an ordinary domestic space and all of them introduce elements that are surreal but characteristically serene.

In firstsite’s workshop space Amanda Ansell is creating paintings that are, apparently, the result of long periods of time spent in the bath. Many of them depict mountains of bath bubbles moulded into iceberg shapes. The feeling of coldness and bleakness they give off is enhanced by the cool greys and the simplicity of the painting.

There is a feeling of peace and purity about them and also a sense of isolation – the latter is perhaps something that comes from the solitary ritual of bathing. She also paints Japanese-style trees, partly created from twigs and other found pieces on some of the icebergs and often she sets her work against a backdrop of the bathroom.

In this way she plays with scale and perspective in the same way as the other two artists in the show, but creates her own individual work. She is resident in the gallery for the duration and members of the public can watch her working and ask her about her work.

firstSite Gallery occupies an old house on East Hill, Colchester, just down the road from the Castle. It will be moving in 2007 as staff from the gallery are behind Colchester’s new £16.5 million visual arts building due to be completed in 2007.