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Misdemeanours, Craig Fisher
Rokeby, London
5 October – 8 November
By Susie Clark

A scrap of highly embellished ball gown is flung in the corner – except that it’s too carefully constructed for such a swift dismissal: orange sequins depicting chunks of carrot reveal the work to be a pearlescent splattering of vomit on the gallery floor. Craig Fisher is obsessed with textiles; embellishment, patterns – Japanese kimono prints, camouflage, tartan, Hawaiian flowers – and the values they inherit through methods of production and reproduction.

Cartoon-like speech bubbles filled with patterns rather than words depict a multitude of cultures jostling for attention in Fisher’s small drawings (Speech Bubble IX, VIII, VIII, X and Thought Bubble I), immaculately inscribed with felt-tipped pens and coloured pencils, the tools of a schoolchild. When scaled up and painted directly on the wall in lurid acrylics (They Said), the effect is more of a vicious brawl, undoubtedly connected with Wide Boy, an almost life-sized fabric car that is paradoxically too small to be real, and yet looks horribly obese, its soft buckled bonnet slammed into a corner of the gallery.

Visceral excess is everywhere in this work, from the Puke that greets us, to the equally aptly titled Leak, an overstuffed yellow satin stream of urine, edging its way across immaculate wooden floorboards towards the staircase that leads us down to a claustrophobic basement room where Blood On Your Hands, a comical pair of satin handprints, are stuffed to bursting point and slithering down the wall like fleshy red slugs.

Fisher’s choice of materials could just as easily have been sourced from high street branches of TopShop as a local WI Market: satin, sequins, ribbon, beads and felt otherwise seen adorning tiered gypsy skirts, ballet pumps or sachets of pot-pourri in this instance make up the components of a bank of computers in H.A.L., an intercom system (Whose There?) and embellish the handles of a set of serious looking knives (Tools For The Job).

But just as we think Fisher is yet another artist employing traditional craft techniques to create objects to be looked at rather than used, he throws us with a life-sized pea-green door made of neoprene, a mass produced synthetic rubber. What’s more, the door has two giant fabric daggers jammed into it, their handles glinting with sequins; it’s called Watch Yeh’ Back - a warning against our ever-increasing consumption of anything and everything: cars, clothes, jewellery, booze, DIY, gadgets – don’t get too comfortable holed up in your luxury warehouse whilst the urine and vomit drips down the front door, because there are countless knife-wielding maniacs stalking the streets.