In Darcus Howe’s recent Channel Four series of documentaries on that slippery subject freedom, he had the dubious privilege of experiencing the corporate wonderland of Egg. Egg, which is basically a bank, is exemplary in its adoption of all the latest strategies for producing happy, shiny workers, who love their job, and love their company. Howe, a lumbering, enjoyably misanthropic surveyor of New labours New Britain, responded with a suitable mixture of horror, incredulity and despair, as happy egg workers regaled him with their embrace of the Egg philosophy. Encouraged through the seemingly incessant series of management workshops and the development of an all embracing Egg social scene (where workers were encouraged to play as well as work with each other), Howe came to the conclusion that under the marketing of freedom at work, Egg workers were actually, slowly, having their identities dissolved by the company.

While Egg may have the dubious honour of still being relatively unique within Britain’s work culture, books and courses on personal management, self-empowerment, and self-improvement have proliferated during the last twenty years. It’s easy to dismiss this contemporary cult as yet another symptom of Americanisation. After all America is the spiritual home of the guide to becoming a better person. But that’s too easy and convenient, and side steps the irrefutable fact that such books and workshops, must in part be answering a demand. There must be a crisis of confidence permeating the collective self, which isn’t being sufficiently dealt with else where. From the popular "How to succeed in interviews" to the essential "How to get a girlfriend", and the follow up "How to make it last past six months", there’s the obvious obsession with treating the self like a DIY project.

Laura Quarmby’s work has consistently settled on exploring these attempts to reassemble, and re make, who and what we are. In early video works, there was a playful, humorous occasionally disturbing look at how people attempt to take control of their lives, by locating and taking for themselves some personal, economic or political power. Re enacting attempts at self-empowerment, her videos restaged a mini riot and a bank robbery. Instead of taking place on the street, Quarmby's challenge to the dominant order occurred inside, with protesters hurling tennis balls not rocks at the camera, and screaming "give us the money" while waving childlike two finger guns. The location of the video in a white walled space, and the endless repeating nature of the action, imparted to the works the strange flavour of a daydream rehearsal. As if we the audience were viewing the internal screen of a frustrated, alienated ultimately powerless individual.

While these older pieces had the quality of making visible familiar fantasies of power and control (everything would be better if only I had a million pounds or– everything would be better if only we could rid the country of El Presidenta Blair) Quarmby’s more recent work has focused on the kind of workshop and self help courses, undoubtedly much loved by the happy little campers at Egg. Recreating warped self-help sessions for game participants, her absurdist, highly humorous videos come across like Ricki Lake sessions on acid. With Quarmby as the chief architect of these therapy workouts, various attempts and strategies are pursued for increasing feelings of self-confidence and charisma within a group dynamic. Like all of her work, these pieces exhibit a simultaneous fascination with the processes of remodeling the self, and a rye, absurd suspicion about the possible success of such strategies.