Grounded: Images of eye surgery confront us with our own vulnerability. Courtesy Leeds Met Gallery.

Brigitte Meile headed to Leeds Metropolitan University to take in work by artists Helen Sear and Yvonne Jones, on show until March 19.

By programming Grounded and Memory Three simultaneously, the Leeds Met Gallery has juxtaposed the works of two artists who speak a completely different visual language yet explore a similar territory: the twilight zone between death and life.

Yvonne Jones’ video installations show images of her undergoing surgical treatment to aid the body's maintenance and repair, during which she remained conscious. The installations show no gory scenes of blood and violence, no glorification of heroism and death, but the stark reality of surgical treatment on one of the body’s most sensitive parts, the eyes.

And that is what makes us cringe when we watch these close-ups: the eyes are our most vulnerable organs exposed to the external world. In fact, I was only able to watch the installations by disassociating myself from what was happening on the screen, but a feeling of pain and unease remained.

Jones’ intention behind showing these images was to recall in the viewer a direct experience of their own bodies and physical presence without which we would not exist, despite all our technology. By confronting us with our own vulnerability and mortality, she touches on a taboo in a society that has become alien to the notion of personal mortality and vulnerability and can only deal with these notions in a sanitised, mediated or fictionalised form.

In contrast, Helen Sear uses a subtler, more sensual aesthetic language in her photographs. Using digital montage, Grounded fuses separate photographs of skies and animal bodies to form virtual landscapes. Only the closely cropped hides and backs of these beasts are shown, any parts that could reveal their identity are concealed and it is not clear whether the skins of dead or living animals are used.

Memory Three: Sky and animal skin merge to form illusions of landscape. Courtesy Leeds Met Gallery.

The ethereal quality of the sky and the raw physicality of the hides result in a strangeness of space: a twilight zone between the known and unknown, the real and unreal, evoking an air of surrealism and psychodelia.

I am reminded of Pink Floyd's pastoral Atom Heart Mother cover. It is the seeming peacefulness that gives these photographs such a sharp edge.

Still….a Landscape in Ten Pieces poses similar questions of what is real and what is imaginary. At first sight, these 10 photographic fragments, which were taken from an image of an alpine diorama shot in a natural history museum in Darmstadt, Germany, appear to be out of place, compared with the atmospheric, melancholic quality of Grounded.

The individual fragments look like the dramatised pictures of animals in magazines for animal lovers: ibexes and marmots in their natural settings. Yet, something is foul about them: they look a trifle too cliched and stereotypical to be real. A closer look reveals that they are stuffed animals set against a counterfeit landscape.

The photographs evoke a feeling of ‘dustiness', not unlike the feeling I get when I look at stuffed animals in museums of natural history. The animals are too far removed from life to be evocative of life. Rather, they are an idyllic and naïve presentation of life as it never was – an idyll that can only be achieved through the practice of taxidermy.

Memory Three and Grounded/Still….A Landscape in Ten Parts explore both notions of death and life and in some ways they both challenge the fictions that make up our existence. In addition to the thematic link, it is the difference in the aesthetic language of the individual works that makes this show such an interesting one.