Weird and very wonderful

Pavel Buchler won the Northern Art Prize last night, but Manchester's Rachel Goodyear’s work insinuated its work most hauntingly into this viewer’s imagination. One of the most interesting new artists, she doesn’t shy away from excursions into the weird and warped, but gives them an uneasy beauty. Her delicate, unsettling works depicting humans and animals put me in mind of illustrations in fairy tale books of the moment when things get so dark that only magic can banish the curse. Goodyear’s subjects, resolutely contemporary, remind us that these tales are not confined to old books. Meticulously drawn and painted in pencil interrupted by blood red watercolour detail, the girl sewing together her feet with red thread, the family sitting with their heads and bodies embedded in a mass of darkness and the girl whose back is circled by a vast, scratching bat linger in the mind and ask you to construct the stories that led up to each trauma. Quietly and undemonstratively, they highlight strangeness, discomfort and fragility, and the terror that can ensue when things that are familiar shift context and become sinister.