Two performers hide beneath a hand-sewn white cow costume, playing a single role through movement alone. The cow is a role inherited from Victorian pantomime, and the convention rests on a tacit covenant between stage and audience: beneath the animal skin, no proof of identity is asked. The performers need not be recognised for the role to stand; identity retreats, for the duration of the act, behind the character.

Conor Quinn relocates this mechanism to a domestic interior, extending the theatre’s exemption into daily life, where the ambiguity of identity is submitted to a broader trial of intimacy, bodily experience and ways of looking. Within the cloth, speech gives way: cues distort, movement drifts from what was set, and the figure once claimed as one begins to come apart. No scripted sequence arrives to reclaim the stumble.

The paintings render the fall of fabric and the limbs surfacing at its hem with exacting attention, yet the closer one looks, the less identity resolves. The heaving cloth yields no answer; the exposed limbs furnish no proof. What the works propose is another position of looking altogether, requiring only a single concession: that before it is named, the relation already exists.