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One is struck by the amount of time and the painstaking detail invested by sculptor Charles Robb into each of his works. Gore, shown in 1999 at Soapbox Gallery, consisted of two white-tiled platforms which took days to make on-site. Upon this sterile grid lay a mutilated corpse, a sculpture directly based upon the artist 's own body. In another instance, Address (1999), provided us with a view into a lounge room , complete with mantelpiece and fireplace, and the trademark 'body' hanging from a coat rack. Support, 2000 (shown at the Institute of Modern Art , Brisbane and in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) saw the gallery space transformed into a hospital room. Four bodies (three headless) were suspended with thin black cord from an artificial ceiling upon a grey vinyl platform. The completeness with which each of Robb's tableaux is presented suggests a frozen chunk of time that the artist has dedicated to the period of life that its making has absorbed. In an aesthetic climate which sees much regard given to the ultra-mince hardly-there-at-all moments advocated by Duchamp, Charles Robb works with methods more common to the eighteenth century. The style of his body sculpture is in part observed from scientific renderings of cadavers replicated in the Encyclopaedia Anatomica. In Support, the necks of the headless bodies resemble the clean chops of the anatomical waxes used in instances where only the torso was pertinent for research. The (artist's) heads are clinically removed, with as little blood and guts as possible. Here, however, Robb shies away from absolute theatricality, preferring the insinuations of torture that one might find, for instance, in depictions of the flagellation... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline