‘I’m led by stories,” Anna Perach tells me as we sit in her sun-drenched studio at Gasworks in London. The wall behind me is stacked with a rainbow of yarns, and on her desk sit a collection of texts that point to the key themes of her work: femininity, magic and the uncanny. Perach’s life-size humanoid sculptures made of tufted carpet surround us, their presence equal parts eerie and warming. Their strange humanity seems steeped in narrative, which she draws from folklore and fairytales.
The sculptures cry out to be touched, with their beautifully fluffy, varied and multicoloured surfaces. They are, as she says, “aesthetically overbearing”. Perach’s work is in part about the porous boundaries between bodies and the world. Their intense tactility, meanwhile, brings out a childish desire to sink your fingers deep into a comforting, if slightly spooky, softness. And their hollowness asks the viewer to imagine a body inside them – when exhibiting the works, performers do inhabit them and bring them to life.
