| For Your Pleasure has been instigated to celebrate the opening of the new Matches store in Marylebone High Street, London. My contribution to the store is based on circus imagery. I have been a life-long fan of circus stemming from my mother’s love of it. She quite literally ran away with one when I was 15 for a year or so. She told of watching for the shadows of escaped lions, taking fallen stars of the trapeze, plaster-bound and back-broken to hospital, of trailer hierarchy and chemical toilet spillages on the bumpy caravan rides between venues. The bravado, mystery, glamour, and danger that represent traditional circus have the ability to make the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end. | 
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Abigail Lane is a London-based artist. Her exhibition For Your Pleasure is on view at Matches in London from June 11 to August 31.
Abigail Lane, Acrobats, 2008. Copyright of Abigail Lane, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.For Your Pleasure has been instigated to celebrate the opening of the new Matches store in Marylebone High Street, London. My contribution to the store is based on circus imagery. I have been a life-long fan of circus stemming from my mother’s love of it. She quite literally ran away with one when I was 15 for a year or so. She told of watching for the shadows of escaped lions, taking fallen stars of the trapeze, plaster-bound and back-broken to hospital, of trailer hierarchy and chemical toilet spillages on the bumpy caravan rides between venues.
The bravado, mystery, glamour, and danger that represent traditional circus have the ability to make the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end. Circus can fill one with surreal wonder, as a lone giraffe wanders under crimson light and into the ring to the tune of a single trumpet. All one can do is hold one’s breath as the head of the world-famous Wallenda family calls precise instruction into the silent air of the big top. We wait while he ensures the precarious safe passage of his family across the high wire in their ridiculous spot-lit pack-of-card formation. Stars, stripes, ladders, buckets, make-up, rope, and colored balls, minuscule glitter costumes adorning body contortions that make you wonder how they stay on. Cages, flight, slap stick, and the pathos of the failed feat being repeated until it is achieved. “The circus must go on,” as it is, of course, “The greatest show on earth!” I love it!
The celebration of something new deserves something of a carnival, so we bring color, stars, and stripes to the walls of the new store. The figurative images are all black-and-white. I am not trying to snapshot a real circus show, but create quiet images that can reveal the absurdity of the formations, the magnificent and romantic nature of a performance executed “for your pleasure."
