Sites of horror, whether buildings, towns or landscapes, carry their difficult pasts with them. Mnemonic traces such as ruins and mounds, stories passed by word of mouth, tours, books, paintings and films all contribute to the making of a myth. And although terrifying events gradually drift into more innocuous folklore, a sinister undercurrent may remain more present than one imagines.
 
 
 
For Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp, who grew up in and around Alton in the 1970s, a lingering chill hung over Flood Meadows, a bucolic corner of rural Hampshire. The legacy of the horrific murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams in 1867, whose body parts were gradually found scattered across the meadows, persisted more than a hundred years later in a present threat of violence, in the teenage fights and misogyny around them.
 
We sense a setting in which chocolate-box beauty conceals a much darker note of aggression. Growing up in the town, it was impossible not to know Fanny Adams's story, a Grimm fairy tale based entirely in reality. Alison's childhood bedroom overlooked the pastoral meadows, and she would leave through the back of the garden, through hedges and beneath a large yew tree, to play there.
 
 
 
Anna and Alison met in and around Alton in the early 1980s, spending time at Chawton House, where Anna lived. At the time, the enormous Elizabethan mansion, steeped in associations with Jane Austen, had become a kind of fee-paying commune without clearly defined private spaces, a place of creative activity and dialogue for local young people. It was here in the early 1980s that Anna, then at art school, first photographed Alison in playful poses.
 
 
 
Although never a literal reference, in retrospect Anna and Alison were clearly affected by Fanny Adams's threatening echo in their clinical, sometimes dehumanised, tightly cropped vignettes of isolated legs, hair and other ambiguous bodily features, without a face or other obvious signs of pulsing life. Alison recalls: "The tights have a sheen; I wanted the legs to look shiny, slightly hyperreal. I wanted the whole body to be like a broken doll or a shop mannequin. Naked, smooth and fake."
 
 
 
The overwhelming sense that life in those tree-lined streets was an anachronistic, self-conscious pretence, perpetuated by a community clinging to a past that may never truly have existed, is explored in the early portraits of Alison irreverently dressed in her mother's clothes from the 1950s and 1960s. From this beginning, the pair moved towards imagining Alison shedding her clothes, wandering naked through the woods, creating whirling dances to ward off dangerous cows, and eventually towards the series of deathly poses among bluebells, in vans, fields and rivers.
 
 
 
Anna Fox says: "It was a kind of exorcism; I felt we were going back to the countryside. The 1970s and 1980s were not pleasant for young women trapped in isolated villages or hamlets. Without the internet and with little public transport, you rarely saw anyone you could confide in. And once you were old enough to go into the small town, you felt the onslaught of male violence on Friday and Saturday nights, every weekend."
 
 
 
— Peter Culley