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Not so long ago, Amy Cutler's drawings would have been unlikely to appear in an art gallery, at least one that called itself contemporary; they would have been classified as illustrational and she would have been told to find a good children's-book publisher. These fine-tuned narrative images of slightly impossible undertakings, quasi-Edwardian in manner, seem to speak out of fairy tale and dream to anyone whose imagination when young was fed by stories of magic, by Edith Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame and perhaps especially Hans Christian Andersen, whose fantasies always seem to clothe or bandage a hard armature of suffering and cold. The emotional realities in Cutler's pictures, similarly, seem often to arise from duress: flight, toil...
