What does a totem mean now? Across cultures it has always symbolised more than a mere object: a spiritual and social emblem, imbued with energy, almost living, carrying the history of a people within it. Totemic follows that idea into the present, asking what the word holds for contemporary art and sculpture. Memory is part of the answer. But, at the heart of this exhibition 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 work in bronze ensuring that it carries every mark of its making: figures caught waving, carrying, striding, 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. Antony Williams sets down his serene portraits in the old, exacting medium of egg tempera; Hugo Colville coaxes his figures from found materials, assembling the discarded into totems at once humble and quietly humorous, yet concurrently inhabited. Matthew Darbyshire 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.

The exhibition also includes work by Motunrayo Akinola, Sonia Elizabeth Barrett, Michael Flynn, Lubaina Himid, Dante Marioni, Paul de Monchaux, Hiromine Nakamura and Jørgen Haugen Sørensen.