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.