Fouché’s work engages with portraiture, the languorous gaze, domestic photography, and how these intersect with desire.

The works in "These Waves" at WhatiftheWorld / Gallery take as their impetus the torrents of time and desire, a heightened awareness of mortality, and early modern experiments with optics and capturing the transience of light, weather and human consciousness: A lace portrait pieced together using a domestic sewing machine -of an octogenarian gay man sitting in the artist's favourite chair (Your young voice – a portrait of Ivan Katzen) contrasted with a series of voyeuristic and intimate pencil drawings of seemingly solitary young men in domestic surrounds (And the walls came tumbling down).

A ‘traditional’ bobbin lace edging with the story of a sailor’s seduction and drowning encoded in the pattern (His foam-white arms go over and round me) is paired with an imaginary portrait of two Iranian youths, carefree and happy, as if their arrest and execution never occurred (Mahmoud Asgari & Ayaz Marhoni). Interspersed throughout the exhibition are pieces from a series of plein-air watercolour seascapes– each painted on a Sunday on a different Atlantic seaboard beach (Cyan Sundays) These ‘little watercolours’ are inspired by Virginia Woolf’s third-person descriptions of a coastal scene in the interludes between the character-driven chapters of her most experimental novel, The Waves (1931). The Artist’s amateur status in many of the techniques employed, as well as the marginality of some of the techniques within contemporary art (watercolour seascapes, photorealistic pencil-drawings), is analogous to the works’ ultimate status as originating from – and engaging with – the psyche of non-normative sexuality.

"These Waves" at the WhatiftheWorld / Gallery opens on 21 September and closes on 27 October 2012