Sarah Braman, Marlborough Contemporary

Raw nature and its meeting points with the highly manufactured – that is where you’ll find the art of sculptor Sarah Braman. At once familiar yet highly mannered and unreal, the work of the New Englander – whose first solo UK show this is – presents metal, plastics and glass in an array of combinations reminiscent of things that we all know so well. They seem to be sections of cars, vans, buildings, internal fixtures and fittings – the entire physical repertoire of industrial consumer society.

But Braman’s meticulous arrangement and deployment of these disparate bits and pieces, the kind of commonplace collections of material you see every day but never give a second thought to, suggest deep drama and trauma.

In her hands, these cultural artefacts are presented as if shards and remains from some disaster, or relics from a vast recycling complex. Her use of colour is especially poignant, the translucent plastics she uses casting acid and pastel shades far beyond the work itself – like stained glass in a church. But distorted, upended, out of kilter, awkwardly balanced, Braman’s sculptures are arranged to disorientate. Junkyard assemblages, the stuff of the modern city, are, she seems to be saying, as chaotic as the society that produced them.

Almost a shock then to encounter the stuff of nature throughout much of Braman’s work. Wood, in its natural state or processed into furniture and crating, is the thread that binds her art. The dance between the two, the raw and the processed, calm and chaos, is what you experience. And a walk in the city or a forest will never quite feel the same again.