ARTISTS TALKING

The annual bursary exhibition of the Royal British Society of Sculptors ought to be a fair litmus test for a new sensibility. Each year they gift ten young artists working in Britain with the benefit of a year of free membership, then haul them back twelve months later to see what they’ve done. Usually fresh from an MA programme, and some with distant foreign origins, the artists are surely likely to produce a messy diversity, so it is extraordinary that such openness should have resulted in such a happy union in the first of the society’s two gallery spaces in South Kensington.

Sidney Brouet strung up an old sash window on a hefty metal frame for 3 Station Road. Filling the lower half with lead, and hanging pendulous weights from pulleys to keep it hoisted up, the sculpture felt like a fragment of a silted, buried building. Brigitte Jurack’s Lake No.1 – Dead Sea was a similarly dark, but more diagrammatic, rendering of the contours of the invisible depths of the inland sea; standing up on a tripod support, one’s eyes could only glance over the lake’s surface, but the shape of the depths were graphically clear. Japanese twins Akiko and Masako Takada added to the fluvial mood with Sugarscape, a kind of geological landscape rendered in transparent bottles filled with various colours of sugar. And when I brushed against Tine Bech’s suspended black Rain Balloons, made them skitter across the floor and unleash the sound of pattering rain from the ingenious electronics inside, the whole room’s vision of wet, subterranean darkness was brilliantly complete.

Unity doesn’t make a sensibility however, and looking closer, the inclinations of the contributors revealed themselves to be quite different. The variety of directions in the second, larger gallery made this clear. It was most evident in faintly abstract drawings that Tine Bech included to accompany the Rain Balloons: at first glance they may have resembled the outer reaches of the cosmos, but with suggestions of holes and hair, and titles like Space Pussy, one sensed that she wanted the body, the stars and the rain to mix in a metaphorical blend. Nevertheless, to some extent the show’s mood of ageing and weathering continued. Mhairi Vari’s assemblage of old tool-cupboard junk, Shed, was lent a mood of lively animation by being overrun with tiny discs of Plasticene: the floral design of the collapsed recliner on which the disused objects lay seemed to seep over them like a fantastical mould. In one of the most intriguingly, confidently unresolved installations, Invention of an Egg Timer, Jenny Dunseath erected various shapes and constructions of plywood and hardwood in arrangements that made one think one moment of Brancusi’s studio, the next of the playpen. In Alastair Mackie’s untitled sculpture – one of the most outwardly attractive in the show – the skulls of mice that he had unearthed from owl’s regurgitated pellets, were formed into a perfect ball. And Claire Morgan’s installation Come Fly With Me offered a painstaking arrangement of hanging nylon threads which brought together the attached dandelion seeds into a buoyant arrow shape. This, incidentally, won approval on the opening night, and was given the £500 Roy Noakes Award.

These artists seemed remarkably unmoved by a contemporary British art scene that is dominated by neo-Pop accents, by preoccupations with design, romantic fantasy and conceptual art. Far from striving to be modern, most dwelt on the poetics of age. And given that the market is always trying to turn up new moods with which to package young artists for sale, that steady resolve was reassuring.