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Dots, spots, baubles, circular disks, pegs and knobs-all these are found repeatedly and repeating in the work of Janet Shanks. A locus is a point in space which can be used to deduce the location of something. Any point so rendered is an approximation of the locus, because one point alone is not isolable. As soon as a dot is placed on a field it is already the locus of an infinite number of minute points, and so on exponentially into nothingness. Unsurprisingly, the digit resembling the dot is zero, a link Janet Shanks explores either allusively or directly in her work. The impossibility of hearing silence or of seeing the void is among Shanks's preoccupations: her dots, dabs and loci are like so many amorphous after-images, seen after one slams-shut the eyes from too bright a light. In every work by Shanks there is a point at which you suspect she is meddling with your mind, not refreshing or soothing it, but addling it. This is achieved with disarming simplicity and calm, using materials of which the basic tactile elements are rarely hidden. Whether paper, card, cotton, jute, wood or wool, the works have a tactile roughness which suggests the workings of the artist and a point of accessibility for the viewer. What makes the work slightly enervating is the fact that while it ostensibly borrows from the isolationist instinct of hard-edge abstraction, it excites touch: although the work is complete it is as if there were a need for further physical manipulation. But before the adult falls into the work with a childish abandon, the work flicks him or her back to a solitary awareness of the thoughtful... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline