Cold Comfort
Permindar Kaur makes sculptures and installations which very often relate to everyday domestic spaces. By playing with scale and materials, she tranforms the comforting and familiar into uncanny or slightly disturbing scenes, making familiar objects seem threatening or unsettling.

The bed is a recurring theme in her work. In "Tall Beds", both safety and danger are evoked. The ladder up to the high mattress implies a refuge, while its extreme height and absence of railings induces vertigo and a fear of falling. In the installation shown here (left) - 'Cold Comfort' at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham - this fear is accentuated by the wall piece. Entitled "Falling", what at first appears to be colourful wallpaper from a child's bedroom, is in fact a tumbling collage of small and helpless fleece figures. In 'Untitled - 1994' fleece figures are again the victims, this time clothing is trapped between multiple mattresses behind the cold steel bars of a cot. Remember those dreams when you're screaming for help but you can't make a sound?

"I'm interested in creating an environment which at first glance appears safe and yet is a distortion of that which is intimate and secure, an illusion of security."
Permindar Kaur

Kaur's work, like the original Grimm's fairy tales, takes the familiar and renders it strange or fearful. A wolf in granny's clothing. The miniature row of beds in... echo Snow White's discovery, while the piece below (Untitled, 1995), suggests a bed on fire, or bleeding, even while we know it's impossible for metal to burn. And felt, so soft and fuzzy, should be a comforting material but Kaur manages to make it unnerving as well as vulnerable. She deftly taps into unconcious fears and feelings of powerlessness, repressed from childhood.

SWEET DREAMS...

Permindar Kaur undermines our comfort in the familiar and our nostalgia for home with her oversized furniture and trapped figures. Her work has the quality of a dream becoming a nightmare.

• What would you make or do, inspired by this artist's work?

• Consider which materials are soft and comforting and which are cold or harsh. Think about objects in the same way. Do you think you could you make a teddy bear scary or an armchair disturbing?

• What fearsome things creep under the bed, lie in wait on top of the wardrobe or lurk behind the kitchen door? And what's that face in the wallpaper - is it watching you? Perhaps you could work with the English department on an installation or a textile design inspired by "Alice in Wonderland", your favourite "Point Horror" or other scary tales.

• Play with scale. How does size affect meanings? Experiment with miniatures of large objects and with monumental versions of tiny things.