If the theme of some creeping horror set against an otherwise banal domestic landscape has been previously well explored (as indeed it has) looking at Dru Donovan’s elliptical narratives of individual and collective estrangement, it is actually – for once – quite rewarding to see these deep anxieties recast as ordinary suburban nightmares, haunting the surface of our lives. The pictures have a sense of emotional displacement that often seems close to violence, a longing too deep or too obscure to ever be realised, but with just enough cruelty, enough rigour, in their approach (or rather their tone) to set them apart from established formulas. Though the wounds they probe are almost gratifying in their familiarity they retain a profound sense of psychological exposure, as if laying bare those intricate webs of dubious motivation and buried desire implicit in every kind of relationship or human encounter – even (or perhaps especially) with ourselves. That particular complexity seems to be one of the fundamental issues at stake here, doubled images occur persistently – the divided self, or one divided against itself and always at odds. The figure and its reflection (whether a living “twin” or seen in a mirror) coming close enough to touch, at times they even do, but never allowed to resolve into a coherent whole, they must remain in opposition, a disorder that belies the carefully arranged poise of its setting, which is of course rather the point. Their crisp detachment makes this (admittedly now common-place) tension stand out even more forcefully and with more strangeness than a “cinematic” style would manage. Donovan cannily exploits this separation of style and content – these are convincing fictions of experience.
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