Fabulation need not invent anything at all. It takes the furniture of an existing world- bodies, rooms, flora, memories, vessels, myths- and puts it back incorrectly. An interior can become a psychological state. A figure can read as terrain. A petal can pass for skin. Belief rendered material. Nothing is entirely transformed, yet nothing remains obedient to its taxonomy.
Calling a flower flesh. Mistaking a vessel for a face. Remembering a place differently from how it was. Believing that something without a body might nevertheless possess one.
These are small errors, if at all. Errant Grammars begins with the suspicion that misrecognition might be productive: that the distance between what something is and what it could be is not empty space, but where work begins.
The exhibition brings together Louise Hapton, Paul Majek, Blossom Oyeyipo, Corrine Slade and Austin Uzor, whose practices share an appetite for this distance. Their fabulated images and objects do not abandon the recognisable so much as worry at its edges. Things retain enough of themselves to be named and then, almost imperceptibly, begin behaving otherwise.
Fabulation need not invent anything at all. It takes the furniture of an existing world- bodies, rooms, flora, memories, vessels, myths- and puts it back incorrectly. An interior can become a psychological state. A figure can read as terrain. A petal can pass for skin. Belief rendered material. Nothing is entirely transformed, yet nothing remains obedient to its taxonomy.
The works in Errant Grammars are full of these categorical indiscretions. They are less interested in inventing another world than in discovering what else this one might be made to accommodate. Fiction is structural: somewhere to put a feeling, a trace, a form or a self for which reality has not provided adequate architecture.
Blossom Oyeyipo paints from a place where the distinctions between body, consciousness and spirit were never absolute to begin with. Informed by Yorùbá understandings of ara and orí, and by the strange receptivity of the hypnagogic state, she returns to the topography of her childhood in her almost surreal pastel scenes. Her gardens do not illustrate belief; they give it space to occur. Early landscapes are loosened from chronology and rebuilt through dream logic, until memory becomes less a record of place than an interior composition.
Corrine Slade plants another kind of refuge. Her gardens are populated by women, flowers, fruit and animals, but their pleasure does not rely on a repaired world outside of them. A practice in refusing the demand that joy must always explain itself against its opposite. In her recent paintings, vitality is peculiar. Flowers approximate flesh; the botanical turns anatomical without quite completing the transformation. The garden has developed its own body; not simply a safe place but an ecology with its own rules, where enchantment begins producing strange anatomies.
Louise Hapton gives those unstable relations an objecthood. Their faces carry something of the exaggerated emotional legibility of the early internet: kawaii, magical girls, creepypasta and the uneasy proximity between sweetness and violence that she describes as formative to growing up online. Rendered in ceramic, that language is rewritten into something unexpectedly archaeological. Her vessels arrive like evidence from a culture only slightly adjacent to our own: artefacts from an emotional economy in which cuteness, devotion, consumption and vulnerability have fused into ritual.
Paul Majek troubles the proposition that a body ends at its edges. Reeds grow inward as readily as outward; colour passes between figure and atmosphere; vegetation acquires an uncertain anatomy. His figures are not obscured so much as implicated in everything around them. In Majek's paintings, a person is difficult to prise apart from what they have lived among. Drawing from family archives and personal narratives, he allows the past to enter the body rather than simply surround it. Something of home, kinship and experience is carried into the painted person, complicating any sense of the self as a singular thing. What belongs to one person may have begun elsewhere, or long before them. Memory follows this same logic, blurring the contours of whatever it touches.
Austin Uzor's work makes a different mistake: it refuses to remember place properly. Following his move from Nigeria to the United States, displacement became central to a practice already concerned with psychological space and alternate realities. But his paintings do not allow geography to behave like itself. Habitat is susceptible to feeling. Distance expands and contracts; memory interferes with location; what has been left behind proceeds elsewhere in altered form. As maps promise that somewhere can be fixed by coordinates, Uzor's images propose a disobedient cartography.
What joins these practices is not world-building, but perhaps more aptly grammaticized as world-furnishing. Each artist constructs conditions under which something can exist differently: Blossom furnishes belief with a geography; Slade, joy with an ecology; Hapton, objects with emotional lives; Majek, the past with a material presence; Uzor, displacement with somewhere to occur.
Tina M. Campt describes images as "practices of futurity": not pictures of a future arriving intact, but small acts through which its conditions are rehearsed. Something as such is happening here. The speculative does not announce itself through distant futures or impossible worlds; it occurs much closer to the skin. Speculative emotional realities.
Perhaps an errant grammar begins exactly there: when the existing language of things is insufficient, and another one starts forming through misuse.
Text by Yasmin Patel