The less said the better?

Barry Sykes Popular Problems #3

A flying visit to Plymouth to see three current art shows. Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution is a touring exhibition from Craftspace that celebrates the often-painstaking processes of creative making.

Amy Houghton Cardigan Study

Amy Houghton's spooky animation is a highlight; it shows a child's knitted cardigan being unravelled by unseen hands. My own preoccupation with measurement meant Sue Lawty's Calculus was also a draw. Consisting of hundreds of small, weathered stones sorted into groups and arranged rhythmically on a gesso surface, it contrasts human time (and counting) against geological time. Neatly summing up the show's 'slow' theme, it demonstrates the investment of care and skill required of makers - a requirement that rarely correlates to market value. It's a pity that such lucid visual statements had to be weighed down with so many wordy panels and labels. The texts would have been much less obtrusive on a photocopied sheet.

On to Dominion by Angela Cockayne, a solo show which documents the artist's diverse responses to the mythical and natural histories of the sperm whale. Informed by Melville's Moby Dick and Philip Hoare's Leviathan, Cockayne's work also powerfully communicates that strange mixture of awe, primordial connection and brutal commerce that defines humankind's relationship with the whale. I found individual objects in the show potent and intriguing, but was also overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of different ideas in such a small space. My instinct is that, with a good edit, this collection of work could say much more.

Angela Cockayne Yoke aka I must stop making things

After this deluge of ideas, it's something of a relief to encounter the Barry Sykes exhibition at Plymouth Arts Centre, where there's lots to think about but plenty of space to think in. Sykes specialises in the kind of playful, light-touch art that people often assume is just a throwaway joke - but there's real substance here. He has a fertile imagination and razor-sharp curiosity about the way the world works.

I enjoyed The Charter or Terms of Engagement an official-looking document which highlights the uncertainties (and the freedoms) that artists experience when working outside traditional institutions.  Popular Problems is a group of concrete-based sculptures (pictured top) that I found totally compelling, if hard to explain. I looked them up later on his website and discovered they were inspired by an adhesives marketing exercise, which only made me love them more.

And finally, as the theme for today seems to be 'less is more', I should mention The Least Most (The Most Least?) a film documenting Sykes' visit to a tattoo parlour to get the tiniest possible tattoo. A dot.

Barry Sykes: Recreate a Nervy Pistol (An Early Retrospective) is at Plymouth Arts Centre until 27 February 2011

Angela Cockayne: Dominion is at the Peninsula Arts Gallery until 5 March 2011

Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution is at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery until 9 April 2011