The galleries: Childhood games and stamp of approval

Richard Maloy’s Construction No 2 is deliberately ironic.

Perhaps it is a generation thing. The response generated by the tricksy sculpture of Richard Maloy is complex but the equally complex sculpture of Robert Jahnke produces a serious, considered and sympathetic response.

In the best post-postmodern manner, Maloy's work at the Sue Crockford Gallery until May 28 is improvised, deliberately ironic and presented not as objects but photographs.

The photographs are grouped in series of six. Each group shows a young man, the artist's brother, inside a cardboard box with a slit to see through. The action takes place out of doors in front of a shed in the bright New Zealand light so the shadows are strong. The box takes different shapes when the sunlight catches it as it is held in different positions.

The pictures are playful, evoking the childhood games children devise with cardboard boxes. They also show the variety of forms a commonplace object can take on.

There are also more curious effects: the face that sometimes appears clearly in the apertures, but that other times is mysteriously shadowy; the way the flattened box can be a cloud or a tree; the sheer ordinariness of grass and trees.

There is plenty to think about, but at the end it is a recollection of childhood and a game that follows on from the treehouse the artist built in the gallery last year. But it lacks the piquancy that was part of his earlier sculptured blue dog and figures clad in sliver.

Jahnke, whose work is at the Bath St Gallery in Parnell (also until May 28) creates far more tangible works connected with social issues.

Once again a commonplace object is converted into art. The most prominent works are a series of stamps, the official wooden stamps that seal approval on documents or impress the wax that gives dignity to a final treaty.

They are huge and each one has been beautifully turned from native wood. The dark handle is subtly textured. The head is varnished and the stamping face is a polished stainless steel plate sharply inscribed with lettering. Only the cross-headed screws that fix the plates are slightly out of place. Copper nails might have been more in keeping.

The stamps are sliced in half and - in a brilliant piece of invention - set against a reflective background pedestal of stainless-steel. This provides a mirror image of the top of the stamp and enables the lettering, which, naturally enough, is in reverse, to be read. The reality is half, but we perceive the whole.

This, along with the size and presentation, makes the sculptures into social icons.

It also emphasises that there are two sides, two parties, to any transaction or agreement. The parties that Jahnke refers to are Maori and the Crown and the specific reference is to the debate over the foreshore and seabed. The lettering on the stamps refers to such things as right of access, ancestral connection and common law rights.

These are obviously matters of deep concern to the artist but, nevertheless, these sculptures have the power to transcend specific issues and work as symbols for all resolutions requiring stamping and sealing.

The formal beauty of these works, the grace with which they express their message, is paralleled by a triptych of sculptures in highly polished steel which are a stylised, intricate evocation of crayfish pots with narrow, tapering entrances.

They are beautifully made objects of great formal beauty. They depict not just a trap for crustaceans but all things that have a narrow entrance to wider issues and, once again, they are closely linked to this land. Special importance is given by the way each of the three structures sinks deeper into the sand, suggesting the way an issue becomes lost in debate, discussion and time.

There is a third work, Hinaki, which is an intricate structure of concentric circles with a complex interior tower. The play of light over the polished steel of this work has remarkable effects of reflections between its concentric circles and the whole is balanced very firmly and gracefully on the ground.

These splendidly crafted works confirm Jahnke's status as an artist of formal excellence and deep commitment that goes beyond the polemic to have much wider significance.

Suza Lawrence, whose work is at the McPherson Gallery for four more days, also strives for a kind of universality. Her big works in oil on canvas make a link between the microcosm and the macrocosm. They are intricate studies of pond life as seen under a microscope, yet the strange objects also swim in a green space like heavenly bodies in the cosmos.

The technique is complex, involving canvases prepared by hand then marked with images taken photographically from microscope slides and the whole pulled together by the use of a painting machine.

The results are extraordinarily rich, whether they appear like a landscape in Traces of a Colony with its soft colour and indication of relief, or like Playmonas No 4 where everything drifts in a lyrical, green space.

It is a magical and appealing combination of biology, astronomy, imagination and painting.

The process of conferring magic on the commonplace is also part of the art of Mark Wooller whose popular work is at the Studio of Contemporary Art until May 13.

His Windlines connect sharply drawn natural objects - rocks and leaves with things that have been marked, cut or changed by humans. The effect has interesting connotations of ritual but it all takes place in an oddly indeterminate space.