SARAH JONES.

JERWOOD GALLERY

The earliest work in Sarah Jones's recent exhibition was an image showing part of a couch in a psychiatrist's consulting room. The photo in some respects doesn't reveal very much: A small mat to protect the mattress from the analysand's shoes, a folded blanket, and a pillow are pretty much it, apart from a section of the mattress itself. Set hard against a blank wall, it appears hollowed out, compressed by innumerable bodies, its cover rucked and creased. One is tempted to fill in what isn't there, to spin fantasies around those invisible bodies. This, though, would leave too much behind. Things need to remain connected somehow to a more palpable reality. Jones is very much in command of her subject matter, controlling the placement and relationship of elements, if only through decisions about framing and focal plane. What the viewer is offered by these choices is evidence of an engagement with the world, a materiality through and against which life might be given shape. The protective care with which, in this instance, the blanket has been rolled and placed on the unglamorous mattress is more interesting than most stories we could make up.

The spaces we see in Jones's photographs always have limits. A garden wall, a wall in a room, the facade of another building blocking one's view - all serve to set physical boundaries. From these spaces, however, there are ways of escape that, while metaphorically invoking dreams, fantasies, and other strategies of wish fulfillment, place such activities in tangible reach: the ladder extending into the night sky in The Wall (Charlton) (I), 1999, for example. In Camilia (I), 1998, the figure lies on her bedroom floor, black-clad legs stretching back into the darkness under the bed. Propped on her elbows, she is wearing a white shirt, and the curve of her torso on the right of the photograph mirrors the rise of the white duvet over the pillows to the left. The drawn curtains don't quite meet, just as the girl's hair falls forward to obscure but not completely obliterate her features. Here, as in Jones's work generally, the formal and material language of the image constructs an overdetermined yet ambiguous scene of longing.

Camilla is one of four teenage girls with whom Jones has been working for some time, photographing them in and around their comfortable middle-class homes. Never looking at the camera, they are seen precisely positioned at the dining table, on the stairs, in the bedroom or the garden, and while their clothing and makeup is as one would expect for girls of their age, it, too, appears prescribed. The girls inhabit an in-between space that bridges childhood and maturity, the boundlessness of youthful imagination and the strictures and responsibilities laid down by parental authority, the assertion of individual identity and the comfort of conformity.

In her newest work, some of which was included here, Jones has been photographing adolescents (including the same four girls) and adults in the back garden of a terraced house in southeast London. A recent image in this series, The Wall (I), 1999, shows Camilla lying along a low retaining wall in front of a higher garden wall. Head turned to face the camera, her hair hangs down in front of her face and, exceptionally, one visible eye stares unblinkingly straight into the camera. It is Ophelia, Rapunzel, and The Death of Chatterton, and also, in the caressing droop of the left arm into the lavender bushes below, David's Marat. Here, individual desire breaks through into a wider social space. Change and becoming, and the appetites that fuel them, reveal a political face.