Travel shouldn't be this easy, but Dorothy's got something special on her feet: a pair of slippers encrusted with rubies, jewelled moccasins that allow her to wave goodbye to the yellow brick road and step back into the real world.
Barnacled with blue copper sulphate crystals, Roger Hiorns' sculptures also dream of home. Over the past few years Hiorns' practice has been guided by the concept of providing a shelter for his work, a place where his art makes sense. It's somewhere that he describes as both 'semi-devotional and a place of manufacture', a conflation - perhaps - of Walter Gropius' Fagus Factory (1911) and Mies van der Rohe's creedless chapel at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1952). Right now it's nothing more than an idea, a structure shimmering on the event horizon. Until the building work starts, Hiorns' sculptures are stranded in Oz.
Copper Sulphate Chartres, Copper Sulphate Notre Dame (1997) is a model kit of two medieval cathedrals, their towers and buttresses frosted with cerulean crystals. All jagged Gothic outcrops and cheeky sparkles, the piece owes something to 18th-century grottoes, those out-of-the-way oddities that functioned as testing grounds for new architectural ideas. Picturing Hiorns assembling it in his studio (enough work, maybe, to fill a wet Wednesday afternoon), it's hard not to think about the generations of masons who worked on Chartres, men who toiled for a lifetime knowing they'd never see its spire scrape the sky. Like jigsaws, model kits appeal to the part of us that hates surprises; but by immersing his cardboard cathedral in a bath of copper sulphate Hiorns made a minor leap of faith. Growing crystals is an unpredictable business. As the deep blue liquid thickens they bud in unexpected places, their flowering forms following some obscure mineral logic. To enjoy it, you have to let go a little, trust in something you don't quite understand. Blooming with uneven clusters of synthetic gems, Copper Sulphate Chartres, Copper Sulphate Notre Dame celebrates what happens when you abandon aesthetic control, allowing an object - a sculpture, a cathedral - to take on a life of its own.
Suspended from a thin nylon cord, the dark urn of Untitled (IBM 15 x 10) (2000) resembles a dangling thurible or the ceramic cousin of Marcel Duchamp's lovelorn bachelors. But instead of emitting frankincense or 'love gasoline' it pumps out a steady stream of detergent bubbles, forming either towering pillars or sagging columns. Looking at the vessel, it is difficult to work out why it performs this peculiar task. Foaming efficiently, it's a perfect model of functionless functionality, an object concerned only with perpetuating its own meaningless, mutable form. Ideas huddle around Untitled (IBM 15 x 10) - about art and autonomy, design and utility - but they slip up on its soapy effluvia. Hiorns' frothing sculpture defies precise interpretation, so perhaps it's better to think of it as a mood piece. Like a censer wafting perfumed smoke over an enraptured congregation, it evokes another world. This may not be heaven, but it's a place where Modernism has shrugged off its discontents, a hygienic realm where muddy thoughts sparkle and art dissolves cleanly into life.
If Hiorns' work suffers from existential dissonance, some of his titles only make matters worse. The words We Should not Speak Anymore You Axe the Iron Band I Wear with Much Pain around my Heart (2001) suggest many things to the overactive imagination, but not a large steel triangle hanging a couple of inches from the ground. Constructed from hollow tubing, the sculpture's sides are slick with cheerful yellow paint and its three corners gleam with synthetic gemstones. It looks like a gateway to a rational Pythagorean paradise or some mystical Rosicrucian realm. Like Dorothy's ruby slippers, the dusting of crystals promises to ease our passage. But this isn't a portal - it's a work of art. Art just hangs around galleries being what it is, doing what it does and wearing unsuitable titles lightly. Occasionally, though, it has escape plans of its own.
Although Hiorns has yet to build a home for his sculptures, Working Out for the Coming Afflictions Suffered for the Dirt of Love (2001) conjures up something of its spirit. Surrounded by a red triangular frame, the drawing depicts three boys taking the weight off their feet. At the bottom, two of them slouch like statues on a pediment - one kid ignoring a blank piece of paper drooping from his hand, the other simply staring into space. Only the child at the top seems to engage with anything but his own thoughts. He sits cross-legged, cradling a dove in his large white hands while stoats and rabbits nuzzle his woolly jumper. Below him there's a spiky runic design and the letters HSA - an acronym of Home Space Available, a fictitious place that Hiorns describes as 'a drop-in centre for people who want to stay for no apparent reason'. Looking at the drawing, we can imagine what a spell there might be like. The centre's childish inhabitants all seem vaguely spiritual, given to silent contemplation and talking to the animals. They're also pretty retro, favouring flares and sandals over contemporary styles. Most of all, though, these kids are utterly self-absorbed, content to inhabit their own peculiar reality in much the same way as Hiorns' bubbling ceramic vessel. I doubt anyone makes art at Home Space Available. When life is this serene, nobody needs it anymore.
Outside the HSA, Hiorns' work seems vital. Allusive yet never symbolic, yearning yet never utopian, his sculptures are an oddly poetic response to our imperfect world. They may dream of somewhere else - or even of their own obsolescence - but somehow I think they're already home.
