Mat Collishaw's photographs and videos play illusionary games with seductive imagery of beauty, sex, nature and violence. Sometimes using new technology, sometimes old, Collishaw twists historical themes with the contemporary to explore and question our visual desires. 'Flesheater 4' is taken from a series of computer-manipulated photographs. At first sight we see a dense collage of organic forms, foliage and colour, almost Pre-Raphealite in its sumptuous richness. Looking below the surface we see tangled up in the undergrowth a layered collage of a rare orchid, a porn model and a flesh-eating tropical plant.
Mat Collishaw's art envelops us in a twilight world poised between the alluring and the revolting, the familiar and the shocking, the poetic and the morbid. With a visual language embracing diverse media, the beauty of Collishaw's work draws us in - seductive, captivating, hypnotic - only to more forcefully repel us as we perceive the darker fantasies within. A repulsion triggered not by what we see, but by our innate response to it.