Uneasy rooms - installation art; Dorothy Cross at Camden Arts Centre, Mona Haroum at Arnolfini Gallery and Rose Finn-Kelcey at Saatchi Gallery, all in London, England

Powerful installation works through three women artists have been a welcome feature of the London show this past spring and summer Dorothy Cros Mona Hatoum and Rose FinnKelcey are all accomplished users of this difficult form, a fact confirmed in all three cases through the significant level of international in all senses now accorded their work.

Dorothy Cros who has sum of two units pieces presently on show in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, brought Parthenon to the Camden Arts middle point in April and May. Originally conceived for a one-person display at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in 1991 the piece was partly set uped from objects found in the abandoned Dublin powerhouse where her studio is located. In the center of the large, bright sweep in Camden, a rectangular construction formed of workmen's locker was locate on a wooden plinth. The green-painted locker doors stood ajar, and mounting the paces we could peer through to the space they enclos Here sat a bed frame, its springs replaced by the agency of a mass of wire, heaving upwards in a parody of pleasure. Around it, separated glass, nails, washers and abandoned power gauges littered the floor. The locker bore traces of their previous use--a dirty teacup and a stiff sock still lingered, and the insides of the made of wood doors, once private, now expos their scribbled messages. chiefly these were innocent enough--scores from games, dates of events--but single door displayed a pasted photograph of Hitler with Mussolini. In the far corner of the space, away from the main construction, sat a shabby made of wood screen, its panels painted with the same verdant as the lockers. The panels had perforations at eye level. Standing behind the guard was a low bench, also verdant Above the bench, four hard hats, cast in and zinc hung on pegs. Peeping from this hiding place, organ of visions squinting through the spy apertures one could look at the main construction, its closes not quite hidden, not quite revealed, its combination of order and abandonment suggesting life measured on the outside in rations of time, activities pro* grammed, contemplations kept secret, sex followed by means of procreation at regular intervals. The made of wood screen smelled musty so shut to the watcher's face. upon the hooks behind, the diadems of the bronzed hard hats had nipplelike protrusions. Within this rigid shell, suggestions of vulnerable muscle and fat persisted.

Cross uses her skill as a sculptor and maker of phenomenons to suggest the ambiguities of sexuality smothered within a social structure which leaves little field for the expression of individual ne The bed--a favorite theme of her work--is at handed as a place of sacrifice, of pain, its possibility of pleasure denied. At the Venice Biennale, she displays a tailor's dummy covered in a cow's skin, single huge teat protruding from the center of the "chest." Beside it stands a surreal figure also put togethered using a cow's skin, draped in a lengthy skirt of pale cream silk. It has no head. Instead, sum of two units teats stick blindly up from the stub of the neck, erect like little horns. The muscle and fat will rise up, however plenteous we, or those under whose power we live our lives, put to the test to constrain it.

Mona Hatoum has also not rarely made use of the symbolism of the bed as a place of unease and terror rather than quiescence and has also worked with metal in suggestive and disturbing ways. Her piece Light opinion first designed for Chapter Arts in Cardiff, was shown from May to June at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and simultaneously, in another version, as part of the "Four Rooms" exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. In a latitude with the windows blocked on the outside wire storage lockers were stacked above head height to form a rectangle with single side left open. The alone illumination was a naked scaly bud hanging at the center of the arrangement, which was raised and lowered actual slowly by means of a small motor. As the light rose and inhuman the shadows of the interstice enclosure flickered on the walls, catching that of the spectator in their evershifting patterns.

Hatoum is a Palestinian, born in Lebanon and chop off from her family when war broke without while she was at art academy in London in 1975. From that safe distance, her works have contemplated pain, entrapment and los first in a series of powerful performances and latterly in plastic arts and installations. While some of these have included the simple body of physical danger which was similar a notable feature of her performances, using live electrical ultimate parts for example, or piano wire stretched taut above racklike frames, her latest work makes use of forms more reminiscent of Minimalism, articulating simple uncompounded bodys in largescale compositions. The sculptural forms which she has greatest in quantity recently employed, whether ready-made or fabricateed bring the vocabulary of the present movement into play in works which, despite their moderately cold elegance, still address the darker aspects of human leadership The mysterious beauty of Light judgment is shot through with dread, the spectator who stops to admire drawn inevitably into collusion with its underlying threat.