The Galleries: News overload becomes crystal clear

By T.J. McNAMARA

One clear, expressive idea can produce a whole series of splendid works. The magnificent show by Elizabeth Thomson at the Anna Bibby Gallery until September 4 is built around one wonderful idea born of the artist's long experience with making wall sculpture.

The idea is to take diminishing series of realistic leaves moulded in bronze and arrange them in perspective so they move backwards into deep space.

The leaves, patinated bronze and touched with oil paint, are mounted standing out from a pure white ground.

The fields they depict are seen from above, hence the title of the exhibition, Aviatrix.

The much quoted dictum "less is more" applies here. These classically chaste arrangements on white convey a whole landscape and sense of movement as well as patterns of occupance. They are also visually arresting objects.

In Big Sky, the lines reach over a ridge and we know that beyond the ridge is a great space; Thousand Acres is a pattern that suggests the division of fields; North by North West has parallel diagonals that mark clearly how a straight road drives across the landscape.

Best of all is the work that is the largest but the most simple. Called Snake River, it has two matching patterns of meanders.

These curves are baroque decoration as taut as a whiplash, yet they clearly express the topography of a winding river.

The rest of the show consists of smaller studies for these large works. One exception to the landscape images is Daroux, a stylised bronze flower which thrusts forward in complete contrast to the way the other sculptures lead the eye into the distance. The works are appealing because they combine detailed, almost mathematical calculation with an effect that is magical - and because they can be read literally as well as metaphorically for travel in space and time.

In the smaller gallery is Areta Wilkinson's delightful exhibition that hovers between jewellery and sculpture.

Small and sharply observed sprays of native plants are made in silver, their delicacy and charm lifting them towards the realm of art. These are works that would be displayed rather than worn and the installation nature of the exhibition emphasises this.

The work of Yuk King Tan at the Sue Crockford Gallery until August 28 has many ideas which take a variety of visual forms, but only one of her brilliantly creative ideas really leads to an involving work of art.

One of her bright ideas, based on an investigation of racial behaviour, was to make a video by lying down at an intersection in the middle of Shanghai, thereby creating disorder in an ordered world of street patterns and contributing to the title of the show, Disorder/Order. The response of passersby is totally unpredictable. Some show concern. Others hurry by.

When a crowd gathers, each individual has a different reaction, blurred a little by long-range filming. In a post-modern world of anarchy things have to be blurred a little to make them art. Order is restored when police arrive on bicycles.

Nothing is more orderly than a sphere, the perfect Platonic solid. Nothing could be more disorderly than firecrackers going bang in a random sequence. On the floor of Yuk King Tan's show are spheres made of firecrackers in bright flag colours.

In an obscure spin typical of this artist's work, these spheres have national colours and their size is proportional to the amount of gross domestic product spent on the military - so the United States makes a much bigger bang than, say, Macedonia. But you can't deduce this concept from the art itself - you have to be told, and this conscious obscurity makes a bright idea look trivial.

The one idea that really produces something visually fascinating is in the 25 pieces that make up the work called Overcast. They are all "snowflakes", with each delicately beautiful image symmetrical and individual. Each is made up of pictures taken from a newspaper on one day. The collaged images are mounted as repeated parts of a crystalline structure. The pictures themselves record everything from celebrity photographs to torture in a prison. The final image is a computer print.

The work makes ordered beauty out of the endless flow of information supplied by news photos in colour.

The exhibition is shared with Ani O'Neill, who employs weaving and crochet. Her three works are made from discarded water bottles, each given a woven cover, grouped together - thus disordered, discarded bottles become ordered sculpture.

The reference is to the constant presence and need for water. It is an idea with potential but one that will be unconvincing until developed on a larger scale.