After studying many different kinds of ruins, the architectural writer Robert Harbison, concluded that we need a “careful series of the degrees of ruin like a paint chart or colour wheel.” For the contemporary connoisseur of ruins, Jane Simpson’s furniture sculpture is as good a place to start as any.

Simpson, a thirty-one-year-old Londoner, is best known for installations of domestic objects that appear to have been overrun by glaciers. Ice Table, 1996, a typical example, is a rudimentary, wooden, metal-topped table with tins, glasses, and cutlery laid on it-but the tabletop is wired to a