The work of Ceal Floyer is nothing if not succinct — sometimes it can be pretty hard to spot: the image of a light switch.
Floyer’s work, in a way, distils the “eureka!” moment. It captures the crux point between expectation and fact. It exposes the flip-side of life, it plays with the absurd. It has a quicksilver conceptual wit.
“There’s a fine line between making sense of the world and making nonsense of it,” she says.” – Rachel Campbell-Johnston
’Genuine Reduction’, 2006 is a readymade sign typically seen advertising a sale or price reduction in shops. The large street-facing gallery window acts as a “shop front”. By removing the ‘s’ at the end of the word ‘reductions’ making it a literal reduction, Floyer creates a play on meaning and action, as well as words.

‘Double Act’ 2006 is a ‘play in two parts’ suggesting a stage set whereby Floyer uses a theatre spotlight to project the image of a red theatre curtain onto the gallery wall. Although the work plays with theatricality, it is in fact quite structural - a simple physics trick of light projected onto a right angle, forcing the light into two focal planes, one on the wall and one on the floor. While the projection appears to be a spotlight shone on a curtain, it is actually a theatre light projecting the image of the curtain. The work becomes a binary visual gesture where everything revolves around the idea of two parts, from the title, to the elements and media, to the distortion of the light itself.