The Tate's ground-floor Project Space is all musty atmosphere and grave history. Kerry Stewart's life-size dummies are wistful, naive, lightweight and obviously hollow. It's in their nature for her lone figures to look a bit lost, but here they look hopelessly so, against the stone slab floors, the warehouse columns and the giant weight of the Mersey drifting by outside.
Stewart became noticeable in the mid-1990s when she was included in the touring British Art Show and Young British Artists exhibition at London's Saatchi Gallery. Seen amid the more sensationalist works of contemporaries, her simply modelled and coloured-in nun and pregnant schoolgirl appeared to cope with their vulnerability by drifting off into some interior and introverted world. In the Project Space, with no company but their own, her people look abandoned to their puny lineage. In the centre is a great craggy black-painted pile of silicon and glass-fibre titled Darkness of a Cave. The engagement with the sculptural presence of inverted or negative space is no more than a corny comic-strip joke.
They Went on Holiday to France is a more engaging piece. Through an ornate, rusty grill, you see the backs of two unremarkable tourists in ordinary slacks and T-shirts. They are faceless and silent, everyman and everywoman, sad but apparently content to be heading nowhere special. It is Stewart at her restrained best, treading a narrow line between deep pathos and pathetic amateurishness.
A few steps away, in the main room, is a featureless baby strapped into a chair and a girl with hands like flesh-coloured mittens. The flesh of Stewart's sleepwalkers is pink, straight-from-the-tin powder paint. Its anonymous rosy pallor holds in a life spirit constantly on the verge of disappearing into some distant vacuity or terminal apathy. There is something touching about her best works, but also something annoying. I feel I am being confronted by non-individuals who may be suffering some kind of profound melancholy but who have given in too easily.
Until April 22. Details: 0151-702 7400.
