On driving past the Verge Gallery the space appears to be empty - a pure white cube with nothing on the walls or the floor.  On closer inspection, or when it is pointed out, one becomes aware that there are piles of tiny white sugar cubes on the ground at the entrance and that part of the external wall is 'tiled' with more white sugar cubes.  Inside the cube, at eye level, there is a narrow shelf and along the shelf, loose white sugar has been poured so as to create the effect of a line of hills.  One small white animal 'grazes' on the hills and a few more white animal shapes appear to be emerging out of them.

The artists, Jane Finlay and Kate McMillan, describe their  project as minimalist and that is certainly appropriate but minimalism does not sit easily within a post modern context, and by creating a work such as this, Finlay and McMillan are adopting a post modernist and post-object approach.

As one of the major Modernist Movements, Minimalism deals with universals.  Through an ordered relationship between object and space, Minimalist sculpture signified simplicity, unification and even transcendence.  It did this by disposing of illusionism along with any form of literal space or narrative relationship.  In these Post modernist times there are no universals.  Minimalism, as a genre or a form, finds new ways of creating significance.  It does this by challenging the old familiar binaries such as form and content, materials and method, theory and practice.

Rather than operating in and through such binaries, post modern projects such as LUMP operate out of a set of referential operations performed within a "field of signifying practices."(1)  They work through a re-alignment of differences within networks of displacements and deferrals.  For example the use of sugar as a material displaces all expectations of a relationship between materials and method.  Sugar is more usually used as a confection than as an art object.  Form and content are also disrupted since the one carries no real signifying connection to the other.  The sugar could be either the form or the content, so that there is no logical progression from one to the other.  Consequently, there are no universals, and certainly no signifiers of transcendence.

Theory and practice are similarly brought into a problematic relationship.  The white cube, which has been the space of art practice, and the subject of theoretical discussion, is re-invented as a small cube of sugar.  Such a strange alignment establishes a metatext concerning the traditional uses of exhibition spaces and art forms.  It also extends the differences and displacements out into a social space.  It raises questions about the role of art generally.  Is it just sugar coating, or does it have a more serious role to play?  As a non-exchangeable project rather than a produce, LUMP certainly raises questions about the commodification of art in an economically 'rational' social environment.

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(1)  Victor Burgin, from 'The Absence of Presence:  Conceptualism and Postmodernisms' in The End of Art Theory:  Criticism and Postmodernity, (1986) London; MacMillan, p.39