Like a twenty first century alchemist, filmmaker and writer Amanda Schiff transforms abandoned and forgotten objects into intriguing and unsettling narratives.

In her first exhibition, Schiff, who describes herself as an excavator of ephemera, explores her fascination with things that have survived 'by chance or miracle'. In We Are Shadows she takes these orphaned objects, whose makers are almost certainly long dead and whose purpose is outworn or forgotten, saturates them with fictional narratives and arranges them in a series of boxes.

The resulting assemblages, constructed with a filmmaker's eye for detail and a writer's love of tall tales, are beautiful, beguiling and, on occasion, vaguely sinister.

A cast of characters emerges: some identified in accompanying short stories, others hinted at by the cabinets of curiosities that they have made of their lives. The viewer, it soon becomes clear, is the missing element; their imagination is being called upon to complete the picture and resurrect the stories.

Walking around Schiff's show is to enter the ambiguous world of fairytales: superficially playful, with an unsettling underscore of dark secrets and obsessive interests.

The work feels particularly at home in Spitalfields, itself a place of the rescued and the reused, the hidden and the not-yet-found. Schiff agrees:

“My family settled in Flower and Dean Street in 1894 from Polish Galicia, and I've always returned to Spitalfields in search of something I couldn't quite name. The boxes seem to have found their own way here.”

Jane Wildgoose's atmospheric and beautiful photographs of the boxes, taken with natural light in intriguing locations, provide context and further layers to the stories and images.

Amanda Schiff is a film producer, writer and lecturer in screenwriting. Her long film industry career has included stints at Columbia Pictures, the NFDF, Goldcrest and an eight year partnership with producer Barbara Broccoli at Astoria Pictures, where they produced Crime of The Century. She recently graduated with an MA in Creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently writing a novel and co-writing screenplays.

Jane Wildgoose is a National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) Fellow, artist, photographer, broadcaster and writer with a background in stage and film design. Since 2003 she has been Keeper of the Wildgoose Memorial Library, and is currently developing projects with museums in the UK and the US. See http://www.janewildgoose.co.uk http://www.janewildgoose.co.uk/