A Sense of Exposure (photography by Ian Currie)
The Hive Coffee House
Blackpool 

AS the Hive opened its doors for A Sense of Exposure, a drummer called Busking Joe began a spirited performance on the pavement outside. The controlled but restless clatter provided an apt soundtrack to this exhibition of Ian Currie’s photographs.

Currie’s arresting images, as stylistically diverse as Joe’s grooves, were presented in four sets, each exploiting a phenomenon well established in neuroscience – the tendency of the brain to impose order and meaning on visual information.

In Surface Textures, Hidden Depths, a collection of abstractions based on everyday features and objects, there are competing hints of the organic and manufactured. At times, the weirdly decorative gives way to impressions of human anatomy, seething lava and looming monsters in dense, menacing oceans.