As Angela Carter divined, and gleefully demonstrated in her celebrated short story collection The Bloody Chamber, fairy tales, though sugar-coated, typically conceal less palatable truths. The same might be said of the works of Rachel Maclean, whose candy-coloured surfaces skate across more treacherous depths.

Premiering at Liverpool’s FACT, They’ve Got Your Eyes can be viewed as a steampunk allegory ostensibly unfolding at the hollow heart of the final century of a parallel British Empire; an age in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could conceive of a consulting detective the very model of deductive reasoning while holding fast to a belief in fairies. Or it can be seen as abbreviated fan fiction unspooling from the Peter Capaldi-era of Doctor Who. Or the afterlife collaboration of Robert Louis Stevenson and Philip K. Dick, channelled by a medium who dreams in binary numbers.

This elusiveness, this disinclination to be summed up in a single sentence, is one of the exhibition’s strengths. Maclean’s narrative, taking on something of the form of a fairground attraction, is fractured sequentially across a series of screens, leading the viewer through the installation’s spaces, like red thread unspooled in a labyrinth. Impressively, the story, abetted perhaps by the near-hallucinatory glimmer of its animation, remains paradoxically luminous when the density of its allusions might be expected to collapse into something darker.

Such fracturing, in common with her previous work, extends to Maclean herself. Author and actor, creator and creation, her AI-generated others convincingly inhabit the translucent skins of both the vainglorious male rivals who serve as mirrored protagonists, and their initially biddable female creations, doe-eyed and pretty in pink.

In line with such play on the multiplicity of meaning, Maclean’s realm is bounded by puns, its title being not the least of it. Everyone has everyone else’s eyes, and they’re all hers. Even as the balance of power shifts from one gentleman scientist to his rival, whose own fairy protégé is much less child-like and altogether more knowing, Maclean’s eyes blink back at the viewer, clairvoyantly seeing what’s coming next.

That the fairies speak in validating platitudes, pandering to the monstrous vanities of their originators, even as they devour their would-be masters’ dictionaries, betrays something of their true nature – one with the potential to assert itself above their creators’ careless nurture. Paternalistic without being paternal, the cocksure rival scientists have neglected to heed the warnings of Mary Shelley in her own minatory parable. Nor have they lived to watch Poor Things, and so they do their winged daughters the disservice of underestimation, forgetting that flight affords a perspective denied to the earthbound.

The comparison with Yorgos Lanthimos’s singular adaptation of Alasdair Gray‘s novel is an apt one, as, for all its funfair trappings – the mirrors and miniatures that furnish the twists and turns of its tale – They’ve Got Your Eyes is inescapably cinematic, as much in the stirring urgings of its soundtrack as the sumptuous gilding of its nuanced production design, carefully calibrating the opulence of its animation from the kind of hyperpop excess knowingly mined by the likes of Magdalena Bay to the patina of the everyday.

All the same, the split-second timings that lead the viewer along the work’s concealed path seem to insist upon a more active engagement than the static vantage point of a multiplex seat. After all, Maclean insinuates, passive self-absorption is a Petri dish for disaster, and following the light is a better option than sleepwalking into the darkness.

Open your eyes, she insists, before they’re taken from over your nose.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Rachel Maclean, O, they serve you get (2026). Digital image. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Rachel Maclean: They’ve Got Your Eyes is at FACT, Liverpool until August 16, 2026. For more information, click here.