Vanity Case brings together recent works by painter Rebecca Scott and sculptor Mark Woods. Its deliberately-suggestive title operates on several levels. A “vanity case” is a small container used to transport the various practical devices employed for personal grooming, a compact toolkit for the facilitation of the “perfect” personal form. 

While Woods’ complicated, multi-part assemblages and bespoke suitcases readily demonstrate an acute family resemblance to this standard accessory, the relevance of the title with respect to Scott’s work is harder to perceive. But paintings are containers or cases too, and Scott’s new pictures zoom in upon notions of vanity and self-regard. 

Her immediate pictorial sources are fashion model images borrowed from Vogue, and her own recently-snapped “selfies”. Both of these photo-types, the found and the personal, are transformed by their rendition in paint. The artist has further processed her images by the addition of a textual supplement, applied directly across the canvas. One such textual resource is poetry written by the artist’s late mother, the other is from the South African writer and activist Nadine Gordimer. Either addition is readable as an act of erasure, but as a conscious amplification of the pictorial image too.

Mark Woods has, over the years, made a large number of constructions, installations, and photographs, in which he looks closely at (and to the point of self-parody) stereotypical representations of “maleness” and its visual projection as both image and trope. The strain of vanity here is intrinsic, a staging of something that is already theatrical, fabricated, simultaneously false and true. Woods’ mind-bogglingly elaborate constructions combine a deep level of detail with the almost brutal harshness of what might be termed “visual shock”. Manufactured yet apparently organic, this level of “visual introspection” may be thought of as a case of vanity in its own right, that of the artist pushing his craft to the limit, dressing, as it were, to impress. Vanity, it would seem, is an integral feature of the artist’s world, the pressing will to achieve one’s artistic intentions, to succeed in something difficult while always acting inside the spotlight of another’s gaze.