One of the enduring myths of childhood has to do with the making of a play space like a tree house or a fort. A place of secrets and fantasies. Once regarded as almost a generational rite of passage, it’s transformation into the mythic has sealed the coffin of whatever shreds of truth or privileged reality it might have once had. 

Laura Peturson and Andrew Ackerman may have pulled it back – if only briefly – into reality’s reach, in an exhibition that pictorially and sculpturally consumed the entirety of the Cambridge Art Gallery.

I would describe it as a space of ‘rebound’ to suggest a dynamic between flat pictorial walls and sculptural gallery floor, a dynamic unable to coalesce or settle into something undivided and whole. The storybook-like quality of Peturson’s wall-mounted representations feeds into our regard of Ackerman’s sculpture, which in turn both confronts and shapes our seeing of what lies on the walls. Neither body of work makes a perfect fit with the other, and yet neither is ignorable in favour of the other. We engage in the “otherness” of each whilst at the same time seeking common ground.

Actually, on entering this space what we initially engage with is the large and visually dominant panoramic landscape spread across the entirety of the gallery walls, entirely encompassing us. This, while a series of adjacent sculptures are doing their very best to transform this environment into something else more akin

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