Emma Woffenden's endlessly inventive work has taken glass into quite new territory, away from the decorative and into an essentially existential sculpture, often combined with other materials. It explores different archetypes and narratives, confrontations and dilemmas. There is no sense of easy resolution about her work. It has a fragmentary quality, deeply questioning and open-ended. Her exploration of power and hierarchies and the tensions and conflicts that operate within us and with each other uses glass and other media in a disquietingly anonymous and de-personalised way, both in one-off objects and complex exhibition and site-specific installations.

Born in 1962, Woffenden was educated at Farnham and the RCA. Her art strips down to essentials, "a loaded simplicity" as she has described it. It can have a totemic, almost ritualistic quality, dealing with the body and associated forms as metaphors in a language that is always highly suggestive and provocative, and never comfortable.

David Whiting