A room crammed with old bric-a-brac - think badminton rackets, incomplete sets of porcelain tableware, a dusty teddy bear, the odd antler trophy - becomes the stage for an adventure of the imagination. This is the boudoir of all things lost and forgotten: the archetypal curiosity cabinet, the gateway into the fantastic. The cast? A peculiar ensemble of porcelain characters. Welcome to Damaged Goods, Barnaby Barford’s latest vision, which is also his first work in the moving image.

Damaged Goods is, in its heart, a simple romantic tale of a doomed love affair. It goes like this: a lady in a frothy yellow dress is held hostage by a possessive and violent captor, until a smitten youth comes to her rescue. Then he and his lady fall off a shelf edge. But, typically of Barford’s approach, the sweet romanticism and the decorative delicacy of the porcelain figurines are punctuated by elements of crudeness and farce: the way they must carry with them their idyllic porcelain backgrounds, the ornate poodles gone berserk, the jolly bird orchestra bursting into action, let alone the circus characters – they all share a hilariously demented quality. This is only underscored by the slapstick rhythm of stop-frame animation, Barford’s technique of choice.

But hang on… How exactly do you create a sense of movement, let alone nuance, in porcelain figurines – porcelain being a material both supremely fragile and rigid? Apparently, one way of doing it is to have your characters slide or shuffle around with the help of visible chunks of plasticine (thumbs up!). The sure way of doing it, though, is to catapult them onto shelves, then set them up for acrobatic falls, break them into pieces… and finally re-assemble them (thumbs up, again!). Remarkably, there are several degrees of breakage here: the good (and the bad) are ‘damaged’ even before they are damaged, so to speak; even before the yellow lady fatally smashes herself against the floor. To make them bend, cock their heads, kiss and gesticulate, Barford subjects his heroes to an ordeal in which their arms and heads are broken off and then stuck together again.

Barford is the epitome of the ‘decorative artist’ of today, with his outlandish porcelain tableaux attracting interest from the worlds of both art and design. His trademark aesthetic could be described a Meissen freak show: found revived Rococo figurines are spliced with incongruous parts of younger pastiches, or alternatively, ones designed by Barford himself. Most of it is the very stuff of kitsch - the cheap imitation artefacts churned out by factories in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the ’age of mechanical reproduction’, made to be available to all, and to be universally likeable. The results of Barford’s interventions are grotesque but distinctly modern – the characters’ cuteness ends up strange, unsettling and sometimes a bit rude.

These creatures and constellations have a freshness about them that does not necessarily reside only in the artist’s knowing celebration of kitsch. The work does something a little different. Despite all the irony and cool for which Barford has already been praised aplenty, he – and here comes the subtle irony – generates a new kind of sentimentality for kitsch. It’s not so much that kitsch is cool again in Barford’s treatment, it’s that kitsch can actually be made to produce genuine affects. The pathos of the damaged figurines is moving rather than… well, pathetic. Damaged Goods certainly is a case in point. Here, the emotional spectrum of the kitsch opens up a little.

Marketa Uhlirova is Director and Curator of the Fashion in Film Festival, and Research Fellow in Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins.