Maighread Tobin

Maighread Tobin's sculpture is often characterised by an apparent desire to turn fish, birds, flowers into hieroglyphic representation of themselves. She often uses slate in her work, destabilising the material's three-dimensional qualities by adding strongly scored surface patterning. It is this technique, which emphasises drawing as much as carving, that seems to lead her into a territory of pictograms.

For her latest show, Tobin has worked once more with slate. She has also, however, begun to extend herself to other materials, often creating unexpected meetings of stone, metal and wood, such as in the strange, Duchampian machine, Instrument. There is still, however, a strong testimony of drawing to her work. Even a primly metallic construction, such as Lilly, is dominated by a clean sweep of steel that passes as shorthand for a petal.

Barcode takes the lingua franca of consumerism (which has featured in her work before) and turns it to stone, representing bands of black stripes in excavated slate. The wall-mounted piece may also offer a hint of a left-field connection between the ubiquitous black line code and the Ogham letters, which Tobin's marks, cut in stone, seem to resemble.

Suggestions of arcane alphabets also emerge in Flow Marks, a set of steel brackets, bearing signatures of twisted wires, fixed in an arc across one wall. The curved hang-line of the constituent parts suggests a flight of birds but like much of Tobin's sculpture, the strongest suggestion is of an almost decipherable utterance in some unfamiliar, ancestral language.

Closes tomorrow.