When the short list for the Turner Prize was announced in May, Cathy Wilkes drew a lot of flack. Most com­ment­at­ors, and not just those at the Red Tops and middle market tabloid titles taking their annual pop at ‘modern art’, focussed on a single element of the in­stal­l­a­tion at Milton Keynes Gallery that earned Wilkes her nom­in­a­tion, turning up their noses at the fact that her work featured a shop mannequin sitting on a toilet, as if this one, ap­par­ently tawdry, image should stand for the artist’s practice as a whole.

Part of this refusal to look beyond a sole, headline-friendly portion of Wilkes’ work can be put down to the good old London-centric approach of the press. Wilkes has re­p­res­en­ted Scotland at the Venice Biennale, shown work at the pres­ti­gi­ous roving biennial Manifesta, and regularly mounts ex­hib­i­tions at major galleries in Europe, but, compared to artists of similar in­ter­n­a­tion­al standing is rarely seen in the capital. The hoopla sur­roun­d­ing the Turner might also be to blame. In recent years, re­gard­less of the artists nominated, the same story plays out. The moment the nominees are made known, dead cert is picked by critics and bookies alike (Mark Leckey has been assigned that role this year), an outlier is iden­ti­fied as a possible contender (think Tomma Abts, or Grayson Perry) and one or more of the remaining prospects is, as Wilkes has been, branded a bit of an eccentric, or offered up as a sac­ri­fi­ci­al lamb for those who like to have a wry chuckle at the supposed pre­ten­sions of con­tem­por­ary artists.

None of these reasons for the reaction to Wilkes’ Turner Prize nom­in­a­tion have much to do with the artist or her work, but looking at her latest in­stal­l­a­tion at the Modern Institute, Prices, it is easy to see how observers might be tempted to latch on to that mannequin on the loo. This is because Wilkes work is, for want of a better word, difficult. Her in­stal­l­a­tions or tableaux are made up of arranged or altered found objects matched with sculp­tures, paintings and, sometimes, texts that, taken together, hint at themes and concerns that are never made explicit. They shrug off any attempt by the viewer to decide, with any finality, what a given work is about, offering up and then con­foun­d­ing easy in­ter­pret­a­tions. Even the broad themes that can be iden­ti­fied in Wilkes’ work - the auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al sources, an ongoing ex­am­in­a­tion of fem­in­in­ity, feminism and domestic politics - are decidedly ambiguous.

Prices is no different. Tightly assembled at the far end of the Modern Institute’s main gallery space, the piece revolves around a su­per­mar­ket checkout, complete with till. On top of the reclaimed unit, there are glass and plastic bowls, each con­tain­ing the dried-out residue of what might once have been soup, a couple of cups of tea, long since drunk, and a sc­at­ter­ing of spilt sugar crystals. On the floor beside the checkout, there are more dirty bowls, and a fish tank - un­con­v­in­cing in its new role as a museum vitrine - packed with more found objects and sculp­tur­al as­sem­blies. There’s a squeezy bottle of honey in there, a battery and some grains of sand in a jam jar, and a rather grubby de­c­or­at­ive jug of the sort found for ten pence in a charity shop. Looming over all this is a mannequin, its left hand bearing traces of the food that fills the nearby bowls, and, almost standing apart from the body of the in­stal­l­a­tion but re­co­g­n­is­ably a part of it, are three more obviously sculp­tur­al works. The first of these is a flat board covered in a yellow material that calls to mind Marigold washing up gloves, its surface inscribed with a heart shape, which is marked out by tiny whelk shells, more of which have been scattered around the floor. A pair of squat towers finish the piece, each made of ter­ra­cot­ta tiles and with a cross scraped into or painted onto their sides.

And so the difficult business of un­tangling Wilkes work begins. These objects are bound together, thanks to Wilkes’ unerring knack for arranging discrete elements into a sculp­tur­al whole. Sometimes these con­nec­tions are self-evident but more often, there’s a slippery con­nec­tion to be made, that only reveals itself after a good long look. There is, for example, a sort of ley line made up of molluscs that links the fish tank vitrine to the mannequin, and the bowls on the floor match those on the checkout, as if their placement is governed by some invented math­em­at­ic­al rule, like the Fibonacci sequence that governs the growth of the shells beside them. The tile stacks occupy the corners of an un­fin­ished oblong, but one is reflected in a mirror affixed to the side of the shop unit, sug­gest­ing a second, im­pos­s­ible in­stal­l­a­tion through the looking glass. When it comes to decoding the meaning in Prices, Wilkes again provides obvious clues, only to undermine them. There is an air of domestic drudgery, with the allusions to long su­per­mar­ket queues and the mealtime frus­tra­tions of a young child, allied to the ob­jec­ti­fic­a­tion of women implied by that mannequin. It might just be possible to reconcile this with the religious monuments in miniature, and even the scattered whelks, to identify some sort of feminist critique of a pat­ri­ar­ch­al society, but there is nothing so strident, or coherent, in this piece, just a set of oblique allusions.

Muddying the waters further is Wilkes’ tendency to return to the same artefacts, reworking them with each new in­stal­l­a­tion. The Prices mannequin has a few strands of hair pasted to its scalp, a reminder that, in the past, Wilkes’ shop dummies have worn glossy wigs. The bottle of honey echoes her past use of jars half full of apricot jam, while the printed card that ad­ver­t­ises this show bears an image of the yellow board, but with the heart shape marked out in flowers, not shells. And it seems safe to say that the towers of tiles, or the bowls and spoons, will show up, altered and renewed, when Wilkes mounts her Turner Prize show, con­t­inu­ing the long, slowly shifting de­vel­op­ment of her private language, with its vo­c­ab­u­lary of objects and grammar of ar­range­ment.

That language is, in the end, what makes Wilkes work so thor­oughly en­gross­ing. There is a sense that there is a key to tran­s­lat­ing or decoding these un­pre­pos­sess­ing objects - arranged just so for purposes known only to Wilkes, and even then, perhaps, only in the moment of ar­range­ment - but one that will be forever out of reach. The result is work that, almost uniquely, satisfies and frus­trates in equal measure.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 18th July , 2008.