"And now, horrors! they sailed nearer and nearer the sanctified shore, as if intent on forcing the saints to celebrate Christmas whether they wanted to or no"
(Angela Carter, The Ghost Ships, A Christmas Story)

WW's Christmas show is a dark and opulent, extra sensory feast; large as life and twice as unnatural. Featuring artists Eva Lis, Lucy May, Jonathan Batten, Hilary Powell/Optimistic Productions, Leigh Niland, Sonke Faltien, Sibylle Heil, Boa Swindler, Chiara Williams and featuring a special performance by Heather Tracy and The Automated Hands (Sarah Kaldor & Shama Rahman) for one night only...

Using video, installation, sculpture, performance, painting and print, themes of paganism, puritanism, nativity, pantomime and commercialism are exploded and served up with indulgent delight.

In Carter's words "Twas the night before Christmas. Silent night, holy night. The snow lay deep and crisp and even. Etc. etc. etc.; Let these familiar words conjure up the traditional anticipatory magic of Christmas Eve, and then - forget it."

Curated by Chiara Williams and Debra Wilson.
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In her short story, The Ghost Ships, Angela Carter meditates on a moment in time when a group of people attempted to step outside of the endless farce that is Christmas. These people were the puritans who migrated to New England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, having abandoned their dream of cleansing the old one of its ancient ways. Between 1659 and 1681 their idealism stretched as far as an outright ban on celebrating Christmas. 'The greatest genius of the puritans', Carter writes pointedly, 'lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan ritual in, say, the custom of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made!' In her view, however, the drive to celebrate this season is too deeply entrenched for such a promise to be kept. And so, on the night of Christmas Eve c. 1660, she installs into the dreams of the residents of Boston Bay, three ships, ghost ships. These ships are ambassadors from the old world, attempting to reintroduce their 'Christmas Contraband' to their white-washed imaginations. Although the ships are denied landing and thus sink into the water taking their crew and cargo with them, it is an equivocal victory for the settlers. At the last minute, the Lord of Misrule, 'the master of these floating revels...the crown prince of Old Christmas', hurls one remaining Christmas pudding toward the shore. This plum-packed 'cannonball' disintegrates in the air, depositing a single raisin in the shoes of all the sleeping children, to be discovered on Christmas morning. These raisins are Carter's symbol of the eternal seed of celebration, that innate desire to act irrationally that cannot be barricaded out.

WW Gallery's latest show I Saw Three Ships examines the festive season in all its tangled contradictions, embracing it in every aspect from the Christian to the pagan, the commercial to the spiritual, and from the collective to the intensely personal. Carter's short story, which was recited on the opening night by actress Heather Tracy, serves as an anchor and prelude to the show. But whereas some of the artists have engaged with the text directly or referenced it obliquely, others have simply responded to the mood created by the author's distinctive narrative. What was most important was that the artists felt they had leave to respond to the theme in a personal manner, thus acknowledging the way in which, just as the collective rituals of Christmas vary wildly between different time-periods and places, so the idea of Christmas conjures up something very specific in the mind of each individual. And just as the festival as we know it today is a chaotic mass of recycled and reinterpreted symbols, so the scope of the work is extremely broad in both its media and its iconography.

One of the strongest themes in Carter's narrative was the way in which pagan rituals, which celebrate the rebirth of nature after the winter solstice, have become blended with Christian ideas. In the downstairs room of the gallery, Hilary Powell of Optimistic Productions has responded to this theme with her Grotto installation, which is a wanton interweaving of various reference points. In the centre lies a display of brandy, Yule logs and seasonal fruits, in tribute to the first of the ghost ships which was 'green and leafy all over, built of mossy Yule logs bound together with ivy...loaded to the gunwales with roses and pomegranates, the flower of Mary and the fruit that represents her womb'. The room is lined with animal skins and crammed with branches hung with tiny bells that jingle as you negotiate your way through, and with a background soundtrack of birdsong and wind, and the smell of winter spices hanging in the air, the installation creates a vivid impression of walking directly into a forgotten childhood fantasy. This idea is reinforced by the fact that in order to enter you have to burrow your way through a wall of fur coats, recalling the entrance to Narnia in C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (that other snow-bound land from which Christmas had been banished). Guarding the entrance to the space is a long woollen serpent, like the serpent from Eden marking the transition between childhood and adulthood.

As the final image of The Ghost Ship attests, childhood experience is evidently a crucial factor in the continuation of Christmas traditions. This idea is picked up on by a number of artists in the show. Eva Lis, for example, evokes her memories of winter in Poland where she grew up, with her two-panelled Birch Forest. Abstract and icy, their mirrored background is a trope that the artist has used before, a comment on the interchangeable connection between environment and personal identity. On the opening night, Leigh Niland bedecked the street and steps leading to the gallery with her Luminaria - a parade of paper lanterns holding candles that harks back to the traditions of Christmas lighting in her native New Hampshire (an appropriate coincidence with the setting of Carter's story). Niland's contribution to the exhibition, Old Colonial, is a photograph of a church, also from her home town. Like the slippery nature of childhood memories, however, all that remains in the image are the blurred streaks of the candles which adorned the windows of the building during the festive season. There is perhaps as much a feeling of melancholia about these pieces as remembered childhood wonder.

If the minimalist approach to Christmas decoration in New England today is an inheritance from the original puritan settlers, Christmas iconography in the Catholic Church is an altogether more elaborate and monstrous affair, and it is on this that the works in the front room of the gallery focus. On one wall, Eva Lis' diptych screen print transforms Simone Martini's Annunciation of 1333 into a sinister and literally 'negative' image, drawing attention to the weirdly bitter and resentful depiction of Mary's response to the wondrous news. This is aesthetically and symbolically complimented by her 12 Days, a pair of white porcelain birds referencing the 'two turtle doves' from the popular Christmas song, covered in dripping black tar. On the other walls, Jonathan Batten's Follies 2, 3 and 4 set an equally unsettling tone. These troubling, complex and darkly humorous pieces are loaded with reference and suggestion, taking in Ghiberti, Michelangelo and Bernini amongst a host of other influences. On first glance, they appear as if they have been salvaged from amongst the endless paraphernalia of some baroque cathedral. On closer inspection, we realise that they contain weirdly subversive elements; a child discarded from its mother's breast and literally 'falling out of the picture', a melting wax Pieta and a blood-red gelatinous cast of the virgin and child, surrounded by decorative flourishes of tar and charred wood. Works like these draw attention to the strange intermingling of classical and Christian iconography in the Catholic aesthetic, as well as the weirdness of the Christmas story itself, which transforms the sordid and bloody act of conception and childbirth into the purest and most divine moment in human history.

In recent times of course, the religious current of Christmas has been dwindling under the surging forces of secular commercialism. In Britain today, for example, the debauchery-fuelled office party is a ritual more reverently observed than the midnight mass. This could be interpreted as a resurfacing of the perverted Saturnalia of the Roman era: a time when the social hierarchy was temporarily turned on its head, masters became slaves and the Lord of Misrule reigned with 'mirth, anarchy and terror'. Thus, it is to the modern implications and contradictions of Christmas that most of the works in the back room of the gallery turn. The tone is set by an installation of a video hearth-fire before a sheep skin rug, overhung with not-so-traditional lace-top stockings. Beside this Boa Swindler, also comments on lascivious excess with her series of prints; Beer Goggles takes a light-hearted stab at the irony of alcohol branding, whilst Suicide Christmas Dinner Guests and the accompanying series of cards Value Assortment combine twee commercial imagery with bitingly satirical greetings in the manner of tabloid headlines. The surrealism of mass-market Christmas imagery is also literally magnified in Chiara Williams' prints Hold on Tight. And Down We Go, a tiny embroidered decoration of unknown origin, enlarged to monumental proportions and reversed to create a vivid, abstract field of colour. The perfect conjunction of meaningless gift-giving and the artistic idea of the found-object is continued downstairs, with Sibylle Heil's film Usual Suspects. This consists of a bizarre pageant of unwanted Christmas gifts, whilst its soundtrack of Jo Alan's insouciant French pop wafts irreverently through the rest of the show.

Today, for the more puritanically, or shall we say 'rationally' minded among us, entering the festive season can seem very much like Carter's scenario in reverse. One can feel like a lone sentinel of reason, drifting into the midst of an enormous cabal of superstition and hysteria. It is difficult to embrace the season as a celebration of love and family whilst remaining aware of the drunk drivers, the suicidal and the terminally cold. Thus, amongst the more playful pieces are a number of darker offerings. On a table in the centre of the room, like some abandoned Christmas feast that has taken on a life of its own, lurks Lucy May's Fearful Sphere, which takes its name and inspiration from that last, defiant pudding at the end of The Ghost Ships. Its ominous contents ooze out from a body constructed of black plastic flowers and foliage, forming weird stalagmites where it makes contact with the floor. Swindler's painting Ghost Ships is another play on words and icons, but in this case a much more sinister one as the central image in the story is translated into three military helicopters, referencing the failed promise to withdraw troops from Iraq before Christmas. In the alcove at the top of the stairs Sonke Faltien's video installation creates an unnerving tension with its juxtaposition of a bare light bulb, an analogue metronome encased in a bell-jar and a black and white digital film. The film shows the word 'happy' spelled out in flashing bulbs, the only visible detail from a fairground ride, whose insistent sequence, against a background of dead branches and grey sky, has quite the opposite of its intended effect.

Like these pieces, I Saw Three Ships does not wish to force a mood upon its visitors, but rather let that ambivalence linger in the air. Nevertheless, come the winter solstice and the end of the exhibition, the shows organisers and contributors intend to end on a high, and will be holding their own pagan feast in the gallery. For Christmas is and should be 'a riot of unreason', to use Carter's own words; it groans under the weight of thousands of years' worth of accumulated tradition and yet can be practically unrecognisable from one age to the next as it heaves itself doggedly through the centuries. It is the product of the interbreeding of festive traditions from an infinite variety of cultures and time periods, but beyond the fact that all these traditions emerged from the mid-winter, it is almost impossible to say what their common link is. Yet the fact that some form of lavish festival occurs in almost all places that experience winter suggests that there is something ineluctable about it, a deep human need, as Carter would have it, to celebrate this strange 'inverted' season. At once cynical and celebratory, the show examines the festival from both sides of the equation, gives a knowing laugh and raises a glass to the glorious and ultimately inescapable hypocrisy of it all.