Miranda Cresswell: St Anne's College

3:16pm Wednesday 3rd December 2008

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Choosing a title for Miranda Creswell’s exhibition at St Anne’s Mary Ogilvie Gallery was easy. Miranda uses her brushes as other artists would use pencils – the lines on her canvases really do look like marks left by a pencil, but they are not – hence Painted Drawings. This show includes work from three separate series from the past few years, yet they are nevertheless entwined.

Here is an artist who is not afraid to push her ideas as far as they can go, and in so doing come up with exciting new compositions that have grown out of previous work. Several large canvases were worked while Miranda was Artist in Residence at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. These remarkable works are fragments of observed moments. By drawing staff working in isolation from their workplace and the ‘tools’ of their work, we see just the movement of their bodies. These works are all on stretched hospital linen. Two as One, Consulting shows a cluster of consultants discussing a patient. We do not see the patient, which leaves the viewer wondering just what the doctors are deciding as they point to the unseen bed and its occupant. Man Making provides a similar puzzle. Woman Sewing (pictured) is equally intriguing as all we can see is the motion of her body as she works at an unseen sewing machine. In the far right hand corner, Miranda has painted over a crest signifying that this sheet is hospital property.

Her next series take those ifigures and place them ina landscape. While several contain no figures, they manage to draw the viewer in, such that they become the figure that could have been standing there. These works have a watercolour wash, which heightens the illusion.

The last series explores that feeling of the sublime, while asking why, when looking at a particular landscape, we experience an acute sense of the self.

This is a charming and thought-provoking exhibition by a extremely talented Oxford artist, which will remain on show at St Anne’s until December 20.