‘I cannot abide fuzzy plants, or plants of a certain texture … Just looking at them sets me off,’ an off-screen male synaesthete complains in Daria Martin’s Sensorium Tests, the central work among the US-born and UK-based artist’s 16-mm films at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes (until 8 April). I suppose many or most of us nurse comparable sensitivities to those of the young man whose words Martin took from an internet discussion of synaesthesia. (Mine are vegetal too: I have a thing about rhubarb leaves, not to speak of certain stalky umbellifers – cow parsley and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation of John Wyndham in the early 1980s.) But what if these aversions turned more physically insistent and unsettling? Imagine a world in which the mere sight of a pen or pencil triggered a pricking of your thumbs, in which you felt fork tines rip your flesh from across the room and the corners of hardback books poke you dully in the ribs.

LRB 9 February 2012 | PDF Download