Morbid magic flowering in the dark

The viewer then enters a white room hung with five large photographs of rose bushes, like windows opening on to a garden. With their branches and flowers set against intense, uniformly matt black backgrounds, they recall paintings from the medieval Dutch school.

Sarah Jones shot in London's parks by night, using a vintage plate camera to guarantee such clarity and dense blackness. She banishes shadows, scale and context, to exaggerate the drama of the flowers' life and death.

Her rising reputation is based on portraits of young girls - sullen, uncertain and often looking away from the camera. She treats the roses similarly, taking them clear of garden magazine imagery by photographing from the dark side, away from the sun.

Instead of advertising perfection and only glossy leaves, we see pale undersides, prominent veins and brown blight spots which suggest ageing human hands.

She glories in such allusions to death. She captures flowers at all stages on one branch - papery petals clinging to a swelling hip, or curling and newly brown, perfect pinky-orange blossoms in their prime, and a starkly erect bud, turgid with life. But as the light fades in Wild Rose: Blue Flower (1) only the thorns in a tangle of dead briars, are highlighted.

Emerging past Analyst (Couch), the rumpled silk now suggests a symbolic dreamworld. But even without such interpretations, Jones's latest work is expanding the vocabulary of flower photography - and creating morbid magic.

Sarah Jones
Maureen Paley
Herald Street, E2 6JT