Leonor Antunes’ Fruitmarket offering is a visually engrossing, tactile affair, a set of sculptures mimicking the tropes and motifs of various craftswomen and female modernist architects. Try to imagine a range of sleek, functional objects and structures from the halcyon days of mid-20th century design, broken up into their basic creative components, and rearranged in altogether more organic and uncanny ways. 

Three large, climbing bar-type constructions in bamboo and cherry fill the downstairs galleries. The ‘homemaker and her domain’ series includes pseudo-functional appendages such as strips of tubular cushions, curved shelves, mesh work and brackets, crafted from materials of varying tones and textures that seem to demand to be touched: brass, leather, synthetic raffia. Spread across the floor are sheets of cork covered in thick, angular black lines. This work, from which the exhibition takes its title, is based on rug designs by Marian Pepler. But the muddle of stripes underfoot also enhances the vague feeling of a municipal gym or leisure centre, and the sense of nostalgia for post-war civic modernism.

Upstairs are some marvellously impractical looking ‘tables’ (called ‘Charlottes’ after an unrealised Charlotte Perriand design) topped with clay tablets imprinted with matting. Meanwhile, beneath the warehouse gallery’s vaulted ceiling, long hangings in knotted leather and cotton rope articulate the drama of this space, as if we were in a big, brutalist cathedral. It’s not exactly a new idea to subvert modernist precision through (feminine-coded) organic forms and craft processes, but Antunes pulls it off with aplomb here, offering formal intrigue and sensory delight throughout.

The Apparent Length Of A Floor Area, Fruitmarket, until 8 October.