Gael Robertson: Breathing Spaces

Photographer Gael Robertson has spent the past eight months taking images, in both colour and black-and-white, inside four religious buildings representing different faiths in London: the Ismaili Centre, St Columba's Church, Westminster Synagogue and the Brompton Oratory. This weekend the show alights upon the latter as part of its tour to each venue.

The idea is that each establishment provides a "breathing space" in a fraught, post-9/11 world. The trouble is, there's little to differentiate these images from a pre-9/11 world, as they all have the mild-mannered air of an English Heritage calendar. They would make great postcards, but as art they do little to reinvent clichéd metaphors of light and religion. Why do pools of light automatically connote spirituality? Chinks under curtains, the bright panes of a window, sunbeams bouncing off a floor: there are enough religious pools here to drown in.

Perhaps I'm being harsh. Robertson is an able photographer, and at their best, her black-and-white photographs approach the formal rigour of Fay Godwin. But the colour panoramas - of cupolas, staircases and altars - are too cramped by the polite scale of her prints, and are less successful.

A few images, none the less, manage to linger in the mind: a close-up of a marble effigy, the fingers limply falling open, the foreground a diagonal blur.

Another shows a network of spidery shadows falling over a grubby electric socket. These works have impact because they hint at a more complex mood than the show's main tone of unquestioning wonder.

Robertson's motives are admirable, but these photographs need to have a tougher edge if they are to fulfil her ambition. Showing the pieces in a more abrasive context (rather than the safe haven of yet another "breathing space") would help bring their contemplativity into focus, and help reach an audience larger than the already converted.

Tomorrow and Sunday, Brompton Oratory SW7. Tel: 020 7243 3577.