Imagine, Florence Trust summer exhibition, St Saviours, London

In the artist Lynn Dennison’s new work "Imagine" for the Summer Show at The Florence Trust, Dennison explores the themes of catharsis, nature, memory and desire. Using a single projection composed of multiple frames playing in parallel, a series of young women's heads, lying on coloured fabrics, are listening with headphones to a mindfulness recording, being guided through an imaginary forest. The artist’s two daughters, and their friends, are replicated to create the series of disembodied heads. Each video fragment captures different subtle twitches and shifting facial expressions responding to the nature mediation, which is narrated by the artist herself. The daughters appear uncanny: at once beatific and distracted, but also like moribund statues, at times motionless like a still life, with shadows, chiaroscuro and harsh light washing out their faces.

Visitors are invited to recline in one of the accompanying beanbag chairs to listen to the same mindfulness recording. By engaging with the work, the viewer becomes part of the overall composition, and the audio recording offers a secular take on a religious sermon which also evokes the church’s previous function. Turning around to face the church's former congregational space, the intimate personal experience of listening with headphones to the mindfulness drill mimics a religious devotees’ practice of communion with God. The array of monochrome colours, upon which each head rests in the projection, loosely correspond to the stained-glass figures of Jesus Christ surrounded by angels in the historic window panels.

Tyler Woolcott, Florence Trust publication.