Nathan

"Divination", according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, is "the practice of foretelling the future by various methods natural and psychological. Found in all civilisations" both ancient and modern, primitive and sophisticated, it is known in the Western world primarily in the form of horoscopic astrology.

Which may or may not be the full story. And in this exhibition, curiously, the way that stories form is important. Among the most hit websites are those nurturing theories that blossom at the point where truth runs out and trust begins to break down.

These propositions exist somewhere just below the surface like the gemstones and hidden objects revealed by the imperceptible fluctuations of a diviner's hands, apparatus or intuition. Some dowsers have no need of a fork-shaped hickory stick, attributing their sensitivity to magnetic fields and auras, to the intuitive feelings aroused by their own expectations.

Perhaps Divination casts the spectator as these special sensitive people - or at least raises that expectation. The work does so less through harking back to antiquarian systems like clairvoyance or I Ching than by proposing a futurology achieved by contemporary means and signs. But the trip is not straightforward and requires the onlooker to be wary. Ursula Llewellyn draws on our instinctive trust in the forms and materials of older art to project us unexpectedly into untethered mental territory orbiting sci-fi fiction, substance-induced dreaming and wishful memory.

Her paintings straddle the gaps between external fact and supposition. That ground - or lack of it - is shared by others in this show. A psychological state descends on our imaginations in front of Cushla Donaldson's artfully posed situations: questions multiply as quickly as they fail to be answered by mouths masked into troubling wordlessness and by eyes averted by aesthetic hauteur.

If the intellectually interpretive method of divining that space in between applies to Llewellyn and Donaldson, Adham Faramawy depends on the sensory. Impressions are crucial: the first is of our very recent past, of television and CCTV: the pyramid of monitors is part gadget shop and part self-consciously styleless top-end fashion. The second is the grotto of a fantasy-fiction shaman engaging divine resources to cure illness or instil evil. That's what one can never be sure about in the land of conjecture: what happens during the interval between source and representation?

Perhaps it resembles the dark room around Faramawy's video'd imagery and night time, subterranean club lighting. Was it glimpsed by the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest who declared dowsing - the practical end of the divination spectrum - as Satanic? Or is it benign and constructive like the miniature urban architecture of a Pentium processor around which the synthetic mind hurtles in search of information?

E.M.C. Collard alights on that domain, but its the kindly processor not quite up to the job. The charged atmosphere exists to bring forward the solutions but somehow they are not quite forming. So sources jam together into a snarl-up on the techno-superhighway, the microchip equivalent of the M5-M6 motorway interchange at bank holiday meltdown, with horns blaring and passions materialising in the hot early evening before tomorrow's return to work.

The objects that Dafni Barbageorgopoulou finds herself with resemble instruments with a special function. In the manner of a dream that moves along quite logically until the scales shift and the action falls apart in a series of disconcerting jump cuts, they hint at past crafts of other cultures. We are not quite sure but are invited to run our minds over the evidence. Free association is a recognised route to inductive divination and we know number lore and sortilege were practised as auguries by the ancients. It still is recommended by those who know about the superstitious way of handling the awkward uncertainties of working out what will come next out of the dregs of what has just been.

And that summarises the way that art can find its place in the world beyond the maker's intentions. Through the birth canal it jettisons the service module of its creators nutrients and splashes down in the ocean of the spectator's powers of empathy and imagination. Much can happen in that trajectory and on delivery, it is someone else who names it.

Martin Holman
March 2007