Sue LorraineBeaker filled with light 2003, mild steel, heat coloured, perspex and electrical fittings 90 x 70 x 70 mm; Beaker filled with shadow, 2003, mild steel, heat coloured and electrical fittings 90 x 70 x 70 mm

The colour black is hardly a novel one for those inhabiting the art world: as a colour of dress it is de rigueur for many. Black = chic = arty =edgy. So why is an exhibition called Light Black so stunning, so special, so engaging?

The scene is set by Sue Lorraine whose unprepossessing black beaker throws bright ovoid lights on a shadowy wall in Beaker filled with light. Like a side-show magician she turns blackness into light and to amplify her trickery she places its opposite, Beaker filled with shadow, next to its light-carrying cousin. Why do we welcome the light? Why do we respond to the layers of meaning embedded in the metaphor ‘from darkness to light’? Perhaps the symbolic gesture of the torch held high by the Statue of Liberty as the light of civilisation is more deeply etched in our unconscious than many of us would care to admit. The beaker itself sets off another series of associations. Why do we respond with such trust to science? Why does a beaker filled with light imply knowledge and progress?

Lorraine continues to explore these ideas in series of quasi-scientific silhouettes including Stoppered flask, Sponge flask and Empty flask. There is trompe-l’oeil quality to the threesome, the black outline of the flask encircles nothingness yet reveals a shadowy grey light. The Sponge flask placed in the middle of the trio seems more material in substance, but again its materiality is an illusion. Its perforated metal sections function to reflect another form of grey light. The stuff of science, beakers and flasks and the key bodily organ, the heart and its valves, are Lorraine’s metaphors for scientific interventions into the human body and their ethical worth. Light black (a space between the black and white world view of the empirical sciences) might well represent that zone of questioning as Lorraine moves effortlessly between science and illusion.

Robin BestOpen cut 2 2003, vessel, cast coloured porcelain, 360 x 243 mm diametre

Robin Best's ceramic forms also take a scientific turn, ground in geology and her long-term interest in the marine life forms lying on beaches in the Fleurieu district. Open cut 2 with its shiny black exterior and subtle multi-coloured horizontal surface alludes to the ancient geological rock strata visible along our coast. Its gently swaying, elliptical shape symbolises the irregularities of natural forms.

Bryozoan 1 and Bryozoan 2 simulate crustacean forms in magisterial statements about the technical possibilities of porcelain. Her light airy vessels, which can be drilled to effect a crustacean ‘look’, appear like nature itself ‘captured’. But their blackness is disarming. Do these objects represent the inky blue marine world suffering from pollution? Are we seeing damage to the delicate, intricate world of crustaceans? In some instances, yes, but given we are in zone of ‘light back’, where shades of grey are permitted, Best also presents a perfectly intact, non polluted white crustacean vessel, Stony coral. This vessel appears to contain micro colonies of living creatures, each microcosm protected by a delicate cellular wall structure. For Best, Light black is a sphere of promise and hope.

Catherine TrumanBone in the bag carving, English lime, paint, paraffin wax (burnt, painted and waxed surfaces), 740 x 200 x 70 mm

The third exhibitor, Catherine Truman, also explores the terrain of science. Her focus, like Leonardo da Vinci’s, is on the physiology and mechanics of the human body. Truman’s superbly carved, etched and seared English Lime wood forms explore areas of the human body below the skin. Striated muscle groups and tissues and the body’s more violent underside, truncated body parts, confront the viewer as all too real. She mercilessly presents a section of the human hand, the palm severed at the wrist and without finger tops, as a study in exposed muscle groups. It is so formal, so violent and so quiet. This lucid orange carving, Palm up is the only work in the exhibition featuring a colour outside the black-white colour spectrum. Twist could well be a strip section of flesh and muscle testing the limits of bodily movement. Its burnt and etched surfaces point to bodily strength, agility and resilience. Bone in the bag is breathtakingly violent. It is a wholly carved object, but the verisimilitude of the human bone, scored with cross-hatching and protruding from a bag is deceptively cruel and arresting. For those who read ‘whodunnits’, it has the feel of stumbling across evidence from the scene of a crime.

This is a deftly curated exhibition which is beautifully presented. The curatorial hand is delicate in relation to display. The gallery lighting, so often a silent partner in an installation, is an integral aspect of this exhibition. The lighting casts a continuous wave-like series of low-key spots and shadows on the exhibits, guiding the viewer through the exhibition space and setting the poetic and contemplative mood for the encounter between viewer and the objects.

Simulating science is risky. It can result in trite essentialist statements about nature when the real thing is much better, more satisfying. These three eminent crafts practitioners, Sue Lorraine, Robin Best and Catherine Truman do not fall into that trap. Each has a focused engagement with science but it is not laboured. A sensibility of restraint prevails and the magic touch of art is not lost. The blackness is balanced by a myriad of opposites and spaces between those polarities. Truman’s cross-hatching as a metaphor and a physical entity epitomises Light Black's speculation about the human condition and the forces within our control. The ideas linger, black is not black after all.