Francis Hair Fashions Gallery are pleased to present a show featuring the work of artists Roger Healey-Dilkes & Olly Beck. The title for the show ‘Fata Morgana’ refers to superior, more complex forms of mirage effects, optical phenomena that result from complementary atmospheric conditions, distorting and inverting the landscape around and the subjects within. An illusion of events appearing on the shimmering distant horizon, only to evaporate when approached.

In the spirit of Werner Herzog’s 1969 film of the same title; who set off with a film crew to head across the Sahara Desert and other remote parts of Africa in a quest to find new images that have not been found before, both artists set themselves the task of finding their own personal Fata Morganas.

Healey-Dilkes presents us with a set of paintings/constructions and collages that revel in their own material tautologies. If mirages are simultaneously physical and pseudo-metaphysical phenomena that reflect and deflect our Occident based desires then Healey-Dilkes work offers ways of negotiating this contradiction. His work despite its utopian pastoral subject matter is distinctly kept within an urban frame. Ephemeral clouds and modest caravan idylls are wrought from the materials found on city construction sites rather than rural backwaters.

Fire-proof fiberglass encased plaster boards, insulation aluminum foils, concrete and plaster mixes, masonry nails and wood vaulting envelop and mould the artist’s painterly chimeriac brush work and woodcut style carvings. The brute force of builder’s material works its exchange with the sentiment of the ephemeral. The ‘permanent’ at loggerheads with the temporal. The ‘static’ in an apparent flux.