Judging by his work, Mark Handforth must be a complicated fellow. For his first solo show in the UK, he has filled the Modern Institute’s small exhibition space with sculptures and objects that muddle minimalism with modernism, make a nonsense of the struggle between form and function, and somehow manage to straddle the line between abstraction and representation.

First comes Left, a cheap street sign scaled-up so it stands waist high, bent into a free-standing S-bend. Viewed from behind, it’s a considered formal study in gun-metal grey; from the front it’s a skewed appropriation of an everyday object. Bent Meter plays a similar trick, with the humble parking meter transformed by Handforth’s decision to make two crimps along its length. Next door, a tree stump covered in guttering candles sits like the impromptu shrines that mark the site of a car accident.

In lesser hands, this repeated blurring of boundaries might be a dry exercise, but Handforth’s real skill is in tying together individual works to reveal subtler, and more human, concerns. Here, it is Fire - an assembly of coloured strip lights - that binds the installation together (as well as being a cheeky nod to the work of Dan Flavin). The lick of neon flame running up the gallery wall reflects off the floor, and the other sculptures, its glow revealing the romance in the bluntly prosaic objects assembled and altered by the artist.

Handforth has caught himself in a loop here, imbuing the objects he has appropriated and altered with the very cultural resonance that attracted him to them in the first place.

Or, to put it another way, Handforth - who was born in Hong Kong, raised in England, educated in Frankfurt and now lives in Miami - seems to be sharing the perpetual traveller’s heightened appreciation of the objects that cross his path as clues to local customs and mores.

This is a dense, complex installation, then, but Handforth ties up his multiple themes with such a deft touch that looking at his work is like slowly unwrapping a gift, with layers of art world allusion and reference peeling away to reveal sculptures that simply find beauty in the familiar.

This review was first published in The Sunday Herald on August 1st, 2004.