On first sight, John Gibbons's sculptures tend to suggest familiar, real world things. They resemble objects such as a bed or a book which certainly have complex associations, but are part of everyday experience.
In Gibbons's work, which here includes some ink on pa per drawings alongside the artist's sculpture, any sense of familiarity is fleeting; part of a ploy, it might seem, to kick- start the viewer's encounter.
On closer inspection, however, Gibbons's work grows ever more abstract, ever more enigmatic. Gibbons use of this strategy is particularly interesting since the form he most favours open lattices of dark steel work with a strongly contrasting dynamic.
The severe lines of his chunky wedges, vast boxes and imposing pillars seem initially to throw up a barrier, and only later does a sense of the sculpture's intimate spaces become apparent.
The show's unavoidable centre of gravity is To Be, in which Gibbons elevates on a steel trestle a piece that initially suggests a coffin or a bed. The form's theatrical presentation, the way it is offered up, raises the suspicion, however, that this resting-place is no longer a private refuge.
It has become, for some reason, the site of a very public, but very loosely defined ceremony.
Testament, like To Be, makes a strongly religious impression, again suggesting a ritual of sorts. The piece takes the form of a stoutly engineered lectern, its bulky size hinting that any book placed here must be a weighty one, even if its gently rising angles suggest a floating ascension.
Here, as in much of Gibbons's engrossing, fugitive work, it is never certain whether we are watching the frail, picked-bare skeleton of some vulnerable life-form or a chrysalis from which something new will emerge.
Until April 15th