Darkness Visible by Michelle Lord. Courtesy The City Gallery.

The City Gallery’s latest Offsite offering explores Four Corners of fictional space in an exhibition by Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord. The photographic exhibition will be at Phoenix Arts, Leicester, until March 13.

The images featured in Four Corners tell the tale of a woman who becomes alienated from the room she occupies as it takes on a strange life of its own. Furniture defies gravity and ghostly figures emerge from the shadows in the dreamlike chamber depicted, understandably giving our subject the creeps as her room appears to transform itself.

Awakenings by Michelle Lord. Courtesy The City Gallery.

Michelle Lord is concerned with the illusory world that lives somewhere between words and reality. Her work attempts to make this unseen environment visible, with photographs that mix the real and the imagined in a mysterious, slightly eerie yet fantastic way.

The project has its roots in stories the artist began writing in 2000. In the stories, she looked at how fictional space exists both on and off the page for the reader. The writing led to a body of work comprised of sculpture, photography and architecture. Lord says of her work: “I like to think of my images as photo-plays, acts without an audience.”

Shuteye by Michelle Lord. Courtesy The City Gallery.

Using card, wood, clay and plaster, Lord constructs intricate theatrical sets and models, based on her stories. She then creates dramatic effects in her work with traditional photographic techniques, using storytelling to convey the concept of fiction existing in the surrounds as well as on the written page.

Four Corners, Lord’s first solo show, was first exhibited in the Festival of the Image 2004 and will be taken to Denmark’s Centre for Photography in Aarhaus following the Leicester display.

The City Gallery’s Offsite exhibitions aim to take art out of the gallery and into the community, putting art on show in public places.