Though organizations such as Common Ground and projects like the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail have recently been promoting the work of young artists working in the outdoors and coaxing others out of their studios, environmental sculpture itself is nothing new. David Nash, often regarded as the father of it all, has been at it longer than the Green movement. Committed to nature, yet without obvious polemic, Nash’s work with fallen timber, and occasionally live trees, can stand alone as powerful sculptural heirs to the abstract work of earlier British artists such as Barbara Hepworth.

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When Chris Burden said of an early work that it “was about impotence really,” he might as easily have been talking about this show of works by seven artists. Though from the evidence of his own contribution—a steel and concrete number weighing in at eight tons—one might assume that he had personally got over this problem, impotence of one sort or another seems to lie, curled and cowed, at the core of these seven works. Though presented somewhat misleadingly as installations, none of the works in “Seven Obsessions,” with the exception of Mark Thompson’s Invocations, which occupies a room of its