Martina Geccelli’s ceramic sculptures may be viewed as an animated collapse of sorts. Geccelli embraces the unpredictability of the clay, the breaking and re-joining of parts emerge to ordered chaos where recognisable tropes morph into abstraction - and back again. Geccelli creates line and form that is purposefully open to the malleability of the clay, the folds becoming both interior and exterior, surface and depth, or form and force relating and twisting into one another. Once fired they manifest as beautifully vulnerable drawings that may be heads or relating to architecture, both resilient and exposed and not at all what we may associate with ceramics. Clem Crosby also works with the line, which creates its own armature in the making, and akin to Geccelli’s work, the recognisable forms emerge and recede with moments of intensity and vortices. Each mark suggesting another with the unspooling of the form or gestures across the slippery surface. These paintings can evoke associations or emotional responses that feel both abstract and representational. One of Crosby’s recent paintings refers to Lyotard’s declaration ‘I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’ (or ‘Grand Narratives’) suggesting a freedom handed to the artist. The very idea that postmodernism presented an option for an artist to select from high and low culture and for example, that the reverence given to the skill of drawing could be combined with the commonplace comic or cartoon, offers itself as an opportunity. This latest work may refer directly to Lyotard as perhaps evidencing the melancholy and scrambled cartoon-like absurdity of life. Both Martina Geccelli and Clem Crosby make work that explores form and spatial tension, often removing functional associations from the object. Both artists are alike in that they are interested in emergence. Yet it is also their differences that create this vital frisson.