How should we judge the aesthetic products of art therapy? What if, as it must, the art fails to heal?

Hubbard’s black-and-white photographs document her time with her ageing mother, who suffers from degenerative brain disease. The pictures fall in a nostalgic register: skilful exposure, tasteful framing, mirrors and props staged in tableaux. The two women appear in some of the images, playing artful hide-and-seek in one, as artful nudes in another. 

Behind these studies — displayed on wooden struts that could have held drywall partitions — hangs a smaller number of contact prints made directly with the women’s bodies. These abstracts destabilise the other compositions, yet not fully. 

Hubbard’s game remains a game, and it can be no other way. The artist starts as a therapist; the line between her and her mother-patient blurs. That would be fine — touching even — but the gallery overplays its hand (not least by pairing Hubbard’s show with an indulgent art therapy display) and thus gives this work no fair hearing.