In an age when language is widely assumed to be primary, it is perhaps worth reviving the notion of 'visual poetics' for work by four artists in which references have undergone transformation to the point where figuration has disappeared.

Not that the phrase 'visual poetics' in itself provides answers, since it is ambiguous. Rather it asks questions about how meaning, aside from the role played by iconography and obvious symbol, is manifest in the artwork. It directs our attention to the part played by colour, line, texture, rhythm, and formal relationships.

At the same time, there is a contract between language and the notion of visual poetics, because the history of the word 'poetics' includes the scrutiny of how a poem or a painting functions. So the phrase pushes us beyond the risk of ending up with a version of formalism, to dig away once more at the question of how we endow artworks with meaning.

Lucy Gent's works move between fragmentation and wholeness, with hints of printmaking, drawing, and painting. All derive from one graphic source, a collaged newspaper page, though for the time being traces of language have disappeared.

Masako Iwamoto has painted from textiles once belonging to a parent, and the process of painting becomes a conduit for feelings of loss, memory, and gratitude, transformed into rich textural poems and colour harmonies.

Sara Owen's paintings develop out of emotional events relating to specific places. They often involve some sort of emergence, personal adaptation, or resolution. For the spectator they can be a bridge inviting them to cross over into other experiences.

Janise Yntema works with many layers of translucent wax and varnish, in paintings that suggest stillness and the passage of time. While they ultimately reference nature and the abstractions found in nature, their immediate focus seems to be the visible effects of light through pigment.