Roger Hiorns's sparse show is a classic example of more-than-meets-the-eye manoeuvring. On the face of it, what we get is a cracked sink overflowing with old paperwork, plus 15 small, smeary minimalist 'paintings' on white plastic. The backstory tells us that the sink was salvaged from Hiorns's childhood home, which neighboured a New Age ministry while the documents – a marked liturgical exam paper from a church in Deptford – were apparently posted through his family's letterbox instead of the ministry's, and Hiorns preserved them. According to a helpful gallery employee, he saw this as a sign, though further info about his religiosity isn't forthcoming. The point is the immaterial density of this simple combo – just porcelain and paper, but also a substantial, significant chunk of the artist's past: memory, semi-embodied.
The paintings redouble this approach: their delicate, sweeping strokes of pale magnolia, blotched with brown, turn out to comprise cow's brain matter. One might consider to what extent neural pathways are determined by the specificity of memory – then stop, fuddled, because one isn't a neuroscientist. But empiricism matters less than this work's creeping poetics: an unknown animal's life, everything it saw and felt, feels plaintively telescoped. As with 'Seizure', Hiorns's veneering of a council flat with glowing blue crystals, what counts here is the gap between materiality and inference: minimal gesture, maximal potential content. It's a kind of showmanship, and Hiorns has mastered it.