Articles Available Online

On the cover of the 1985 Pelican edition of D W Winnicott’s 1971 book, Playing and Reality, there is a picture, by Lawrence Mynott, of a teddy bear with a missing plastic eye Winnicott is famous, of course, for talking about teddy bears He writes: ‘the object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated’ One must, he notes, ‘recognise the central position of Winnie-the-Pooh’ in the life of the child Teddy bears without eyes and Winnie-the-Pooh-type creatures turn up quite a bit in Hannah Black’s Some Context (2017) There are seven Transitional Objects scattered about the gallery space These visionless fabric animals, some bears, some dog-like, one elephant-like (the latter hung up on some metal hooks), are filled with shredded copies of a text called The Situation, 20,000 copies of which (bar those that have been taken and/or shredded) form a strange temple-like monument in the middle of the room, guarded by an animal with long silky hair that looks like someone’s idea of an Afghan hound if they had never seen one   The floor, entitled Carpet, is covered with already-shredded pages from the book, and in odd clearings, there are Creatures made of modeling clay – some are faces, some are eyes, perhaps the missing eyes of the toys – and others are figurines, clutching at the side of the fabric animals One is just a smear, though perhaps it has been stepped on, as differentiating the curious crunch of shredded paper from the partly hidden modelled objects makes wandering around the show rather delicate In three sites, menacing paper shredders, switched on and full of eaten paper, add an air of dangerous possibility – should I shred the book? Is that what the machines want? Is that what the artist wants? On the back of the book two small diagrams show a bear-like creature throwing the book up into the air as it appears to explode, and another shows the bear walking off with the book under its arm I followed the second bear   All this anxiety, uncertainty and possibility is perhaps part of the point – after all,