Alice Maher, Collar, 2003. © the artist

Melina Greenfield sees a very meaty exhibition at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

Natural Artifice is a new exhibition by Alice Maher, running until April 9 2007 at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. As one of Ireland’s leading artists she takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride through different media including photography, installation, sketching and drawing.

The Tipperary-born artist hopes to open the mind to an unusual blend of nature versus art and one thing you will not fail to notice is the abundance of snails - a theme that runs throughout Maher’s work.

Not only a fascinating mollusc to watch and draw with its perfect spiral shell, the snail is evidently a clever creature, carrying its home around wherever it chooses to go. Do the shell's qualities, especially its design, make a distinction between art and nature?

A Snail Service and Snail Goblets have been specially commissioned by the museum. The series of bone china plates with smeared patterns in gray, green and black patterns are, on closer inspection, covered in snail trails, which have been produced by feeding the snails food dye.

Alice Maher, Palisade, 2003. © the artist

The goblets are similar but the glass is etched where the snails have left their mark. Repulsive to some, no doubt, but that’s the point. And in a kind of chicken or egg moment, I wonder who is the artist here - Maher or the snail?

Further on the Lambda prints are fascinating and uncomfortable. A series of seven photographs show Maher from the chest up adorning herself with a cage of twigs around her face, a balaclava of moss, a mask of snail shells, and probably the most disturbing, a necklace of offal.

Lacrymatory, a Perspex box that holds tear-shaped glass, is illuminated from below and on first view it appears to be a bright aesthetically pleasing piece. The tear-shaped glass is relevent, however, as lacrymatories were glass bottles used by Romans to catch the tears of mourners after someone had died; the bottles were then placed in the coffin.

Alice Maher, Helmet, 2003. © the artist

Another piece is titled the House of Thorns - a small basic wooden house covered very carefully with rows of thorns, each beautifully detailed with symmetrically matched lines.

The largest piece in the collection is the Mnemosyn, or ice bed. This bed demands a room to itself and is made of copper piping attached to a bed with a refrigerating unit underneath - imagine a freezer turned inside out. A layer of frost builds on the bed until it is turned off at night, when it melts.

This piece is always active and responds to the environment around it. If the exhibition room is busy there is less moisture, causing less frost on the bed. I was expecting the room to be chilly but it was warm, even when I stood right next to the bed. The temptation to touch the frost was almost too much.

There is much more to see in this original and sometimes disturbing exhibition: this is only the tip of the iceberg, or rather tip of the ice bed.