Hannah Starkey's cinematic photos come to Mead Gallery in first solo show for a decade

Exhibition: Hannah Starkey – Twenty-Nine Pictures, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, until March 12 2011

Everyday moments and drama worthy of the big screen would appear to be two poles of human experience, with few of us ever actually reaching the latter.

But in the photographs of Hannah Starkey, the quietest of scenes are given emotional pull thanks to artful composition and a cinematographic treatment.

Her pictures are also carefully cast and the Belfast-born photographer often uses actors to play out the drama in her tableaux. All her protagonists are women.

The results look relatively unstaged and could be fleeting moments in an arthouse screening. Yet by contrast with most movies, these are stories which do not unfold.

Like promotional stills for films which you will never see, Starkey’s images leave a lot to the imagination. They should promise and frustrate in equal measure.

Perhaps this sense of the incomplete is why curator Diarmuid Costello chose just 29 photographs for the artist’s biggest solo show in a decade.
  

• Open 12pm-9pm Monday-Saturday. Admission free.
  

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