Beasts: Helen Flockhart and Beth Carter

Sundry Beasts roam these paintings: the minotaur; feared and loathed, rapacious devourer of human flesh, but equally a victim of the circumstances which conspired to create him (wasn't every monster once a child?); lions and serpents which populate re-imaginings of Eve; and a listless centaur cowers in the presence of Athena, bedecked in a pelt of Medusa heads. 

These beasts provide a metaphor for the bestial aspects of human nature and also the vulnerability and pathos therein: the whole messy mix whch constitutes humanity. The way we view the tropes expounded within stories - from greek myth, from Genesis, from legend - whether perpetuated or subverted, tells us much about ourselves in the here and now.