Disappearing acts

“I loved spot-the-difference as a kid,” confesses Amelia Cross as we huddle in the back room of Incubator Gallery, Marylebone, for the opening of her exhibition, Rules for Disappearance. Behind us, her “Thirty-one Studies In a Cheat,” exemplifies this – four rows of eight “studies” of cloth, with slight variations in pattern, cut and button placement, arranged like a classroom of school children on the gridded wall. Straightforward at first glance, the real spot-the-difference is much subtler: in an uncanny but masterful display of trompe l’oeil, only one of the cuttings is pinned with real masking tape, and only one contains a real button. 

The English school uniform, which feels to any adult both familiar and removed, is the sweeping subject of Rules for Disappearance. “I love the unspoken language of a uniform,” explains Cross. “You’re told by authority to wear it one way, but there’s the hidden language of rolling up your skirt, or untucking your shirt. It’s not something you’re told; it’s something that you observe – a way of bending the rules whilst still conforming to them.”

This tension is an evidently productive site of imagination for the artist: at the opening, guests were requested to don a neck tie, preferably one acquired at school. Those who followed the rules were awarded a green and gold badge reading “Perfect” – a play on the “Prefect” badges bestowed upon the well-behaved. Downstairs, “Major General” is an oil-on-linen mock-up of a school blazer festooned with painted-on badges, which she compares ironically to the lapel of a war hero. Somewhere between Domenico Gnoli and St Trinian’s, Rules for Disappearance is full of charming, curious moments such as these.

Amelia Cross is clearly a talented painter, but it is her background in tailoring which gives the works their particular sense of precision and tactility. Cross initially studied bespoke tailoring, where she loved the craftsmanship but became “burnt out” with the industry’s seasonality. She then pivoted to fine art with a painting MA at the RCA, but felt repressed by the medium’s two-dimensionality. It wasn’t until she combined the two that she understood where to carve her niche: “I started cutting a trench and a collar, and then painting the buttons. That was really where it clicked: the mix of a real shadow and a painted shadow.” 

Reality and illusion, breaking the rules and bending them: though the name of the exhibition appears to condemn uniformity, it is instead a humble, hidden celebration of its potential for disruption. Amelia Cross’s Rules for Disappearance is on at Incubator Gallery, 2 Chiltern Street, London, until the 26th September.