Ryan’s bibelot installations do have a charm to them. Through the ground floor gallery’s window, the retrospective looks like a playground. Assemblages of match boxes, carpets topped with indiscernible colourful entitles, and crochet yarn nets filled with conkers are cute enough. But here the fun ends, sadly, and one gains little from entering to eye up these objects closely. Ryan, more sadly still, has gained even less by ordering them in her entirely imitable manner for over four decades.

The impulse at play — and one sees this from any one of the hundred works here — is that repetition makes up for an idea by sheer volume. It doesn’t. Ryan sews together pin cushions until they become duvets, for example, or stacks cardboard trays until they turn into totems. This strategy fails precisely in its repetition. Ryan expects that each of her collections carries a different thought. How no one spotted this juvenile error is bewildering.

Ryan’s giant bronze fruit, lesser represented in the show, are the one exception in her oeuvre, and it’d have been good to see more of them. How far they travel beyond merely “exotic” is hard to chart in this context. Ryan, it seems, prefers to hang kitchen gadgets on the walls of her studio as she did in the ’80s, having barely developed an engaging idiom. The gallery knows this and launches each little trinket with not only curatorial verbiage but also the artist’s autobiographical note. If these texts are more interesting than the works, they only indict the enterprise further.