Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts paints stylised, historicised portraits of children. The blurb attests that "familiar objects are made strange and nothing can be taken for granted... representations of childhood are subtly overshadowed by the uncanny effects." Yes, Roberts puts slightly creepy shadows in some of the portraits but 'uncanny' is not quite the word one would use to describe the work. 'Canny' might be more accurate. Roberts’ portraits are aesthetically individual, without being overtly subversive, but the blurb will happily tell us different; that through Foucault's influence she "delves deeply into the environments and apparatus through which social experience is given shape."

If deep delving has been done, the dividends remain immanently intangible. Appeasing the theorists and the aesthetes, and offending neither; that is canny. The blurb and body of work are mismatched, apart from some exceptions: Refugees at the Montessori School contains an engaging, subtle and disconcerting distortion of spatial perspective. It is rich and effective signifier for the distortions that institutions holding power over children can have on our view of childhood itself.

Upstairs, in the cabinet containing sketchbook and source materials, Roberts exhibits another compelling use of space. Although only a sketch, the handling of perspective is positively Francis Bacon-like in its unsettling spatial constructions. Across from this hangs Veil. Visually the strongest work, it also asks the most of the viewer intellectually. It shows sections of Madox-Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! and The Arnolfini Portrait, both surrounded by swathes of void. It evokes the myriad ways in which image and changing image cultures influence our expectations of children and childhood. It is unfortunate this effectively communicated fecundity of thought on childhood, institutions and the children occupying them is absent from the rest of the exhibition.