At the centre of a circular lawn in Trinity Hall, where you might expect to be sheltered by the reaching arms of a plane tree, there are three converging uprights making something like a tipi stripped of its skin. Students and tourists take a glance as they hurry or wander by. They might note that the structure stands on a tree stump, and that one of the uprights is supported by a pile of black, metallic books. They might congratulate themselves for inferring the poignance of the absent plane and the irony of the fact that books (made from wood, did you know?) are now supporting a man-made item in its place. Some of the passers by might even give the sculptor a pat on the back for placing the structure within direct view of the college’s Jerwood Library. I alone circumambulate the naked tipi, and thus am the only person who reads the large message inscribed on the back of one of its supports: “The birth of a book is the death of a tree.” I wonder if those select ponderers that congratulated the artist would do so if they had also discovered such simplicity.

Opposite, ten of Fesenmaier’s paintings have been deposited. They are large, and are greater in artistic and intellectual depth than the sculpture outside. In spite of (or perhaps because of) their size, their most wonderful aspects are revealed when you are within a brush’s distance of the canvas. Indelicate splurges of colour become surprisingly pleasing topography: I can see bits of fluff trapped in the paint; I can see the gentle ripple of the paint-warped canvas. I can see what looks like a still damp red wine stain mopped up by grains of sand. My reaching finger retracts from tar-black, and is firmly enclosed in a fist upon sight of what appears to be animal faeces smudged by a shoe heel. Yet this is far from unpleasant. You feel as if Fesenmaier is tempting you, in the certain knowledge that you will not put finger to canvas - and recognising such manipulation is delightful.

Unfortunately, after I have looked at three or four, I realise that I am approaching each in the same way and admiring similar aspects in each. The works are passive, awaiting analytical eyes, and they do not challenge you, nor (at least) make you feel as if you are being challenged. Like the humming silence, the warmth of the cold sunlight filtering through the windows (indeed at one point I almost drop off), the paintings are comfortable, and it requires a contrived effort to get through the remainder of the exhibition. Occasionally I discover a new texture or method: transparent wax spreads over one painting, but it is only momentarily interesting, and less so than if the wax had been imitated in paint like the wine stain, the sand, the animal faeces. The works become honest and lose their ability to deceive and surprise.But as I turn away from the paintings which, in the course of my viewing them, have lost their vitality, and exit to pass by the dead sculpture, I spot a spider spinning a new web between two of the uprights. And I think that, after all, it might do some good.

‘Trans|figur|ation’ by Helene Fesenmaier is at Trinity Hall, Saturdays 09.30-12.30 and Sundays 14.00-17.00 until 25 November.