What does a totem mean now? Across cultures it has always been more than an object: a spiritual & social emblem, imbued with energy, almost living, carrying the history of a people within it. Symbolizing something bigger than itself, Totemic follows that idea into the present, asking what the word still holds for contemporary art & sculpture. Memory is part of the answer. But at the heart of the show is the sense that a totem is, a unique expression of who we are: and of what we have chosen to value.

These totems render a fixed point to gather around, return to, or to walk with.

The collection looks forward as readily as back. Elisabeth Frink spent a lifetime on the human figure and the animal, and the unstable parallels between the two; Laurence Edwards works the same charged territory, casting his Walking Men in bronze that still carries every mark of its making — figures caught mid-stride, drawn as much from myth as from the Suffolk landscape he works within. Nicola Hicks builds her animals by hand, in straw and plaster before bronze, with an individuality that makes them startlingly alive, while Christie Brown‘s clay bodies seem excavated rather than sculpted, drawn up out of mythological archetype.

Others keep to the quieter, slower crafts. Tuesday Riddell revives the near-lost art of Japanning, layering pigment, silver and 23.5-carat gold into dark panels that reward slow looking; Antony Williams sets down his serene portraits in the old, exacting medium of egg tempera; and Makoto Kagoshima sounds one of the gentlest note of all, painting flowerbeds and apricots onto earthenware with the patient devotion of folk art. Matthew Darbyshire alone answers from the present day, his polished, fabricated forms turning the gallery — and us — back on ourselves.

Across half a century and a range of disciplines, these are artists who have aimed, and still do, to ground the audience in meditation. That, finally, is the case Totemic makes: that attentiveness to form, to material, to time itself is one of the truest ways of making and seeing.