Secret Garden
Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham ***
We all need our own secret garden, a haven from the rat race, a private, pretend space where we can indulge in the illusion of harmony with nature, where world weariness can be eased by contact with small-scale demonstrations of nature's mysterious tendency to regenerate. For many of us, wrapped in bedspreads and scented with pot-pourri or, indeed, with pot, it's a dream place.
The artists in Secret Garden cultivate and comment on this virtual allotment of nature-made-safe. Disappointingly, much of the work rather obviously points out the artifice and willing self-deceptions of the pastime. In his photographic series Flora Industrialis, Vik Muniz presents faded black-and-white close-ups of silk roses. Louise Hopkins's canvases are a fake rococo mass of florid wall- paper. Sian Bonnell photographs domestic objects, a butterfly pastry cutter and a rabbit-shaped jelly, displaced in the Dorset countryside. The metaphors are self-conscious, easily interpretable and, of course, ironic. Rob Kesseler's plastic roses are presented in a vase labelled Weed. Elsewhere, thankfully, Kesseler gets somewhat more cryptic with a hybrid sculptural concoction in which flowers piercing a dinner plate and sprouting from a rock are set next to an untitled book on top of a lemon radiator.
Such artists go on about nature as a cultural construct. There's a distrust of the seductive complexities and ambivalences of direct experience (if it's still possible to conceive of such a thing). I get the distinct feeling they are afraid to get their concepts mucky. Furthermore, their secret garden appears to be a thoroughly English, present-day, TV-mediated affair. There's no sign of the Romantic sublime of follies, lunatic ruins and the landscaped wilderness. There's none of the erotic frisson associated with the secret gardens of other cultures (there's a highly popular Japanese comic titled The Garden Party of No-Panty Angels that might have livened the show up considerably).
It's left to just two artists to hint at something lurking behind the decorative borders. Avis Newman's Bird Box, La Sotola Dell'Uccello is a black frame fitted with a lump of old driftwood. It's a dark little area of ultimate uncertainty. Something lives in the gaps between its element and we don't, and can't, know what it is. By contrast, Andy Harper's close-up paintings of thousands of green-as-green-can-be blades of grass are obsessively super-defined. This is certainly a dream of a lawn, with no signs of weeds, fungi, moss or creepy crawlies. So why do I feel that some awfully frustrated thing is just about to burst through the all-too-ordered surface?
Until July 29. Details: 0115- 915 2828.
