Lisa Young is a meticulous painter of still-lifes. But what are these still-lifes? There is much more to these delicious, subtly powerful works than meets the initial glance. Her work contains clues - the selection of objects, their beauty and their symbolic weight, the composition, the relationship between objects, the use of light and shade and of varying light sources, even the dark picture frames. These all combine to create the puzzle. Behind the beauty of the object depicted and the delicious rendering lies a message.

17th Century Dutch still-lifes were often little morality plays, incorporating symbols of mortality or mutability, and vanitas, objects suggesting vanity or perhaps the folly of material pursuits. Young revitalises this genre and makes it her own. In one work she depicts a skull sitting on a stack of black cloth-covered books, with ripe pomegranates bursting all around. But the skull is obviously plastic - this is no archaeological find or personal memento, much less a musing on death, but a medical student's model, or a toy, that mocks death and decay. A plastic skull is a creation of the twentieth century, the century in which the Western world began to challenge its own mortality. This is a reminder not so much of the need for faith as of its failure.

In Five Senses, Young depicts objects that relate to smell, touch, sight, taste and sound - a radio evokes the last of these. The radio looks out of place amongst the other objects, including fruit and rich folds of cloth. This work emphasises our concern with sensory pleasure. And it begs the question of a sixth sense.

The inclusion of a plastic bag, or the radio, for example, intriguingly makes the work contemporary, creating a vernacular. Without such devices, these images could have been rendered at any time in the last several centuries. The composition is crucial - in some works, the objects depicted appear naturally arranged, in others the arrangement is obviously contrived. Young has always had a strong interest in the formal properties of painting - colour and composition. She loves vessels, which have such strong symbolic potential - what do they contain? The plastic bag evokes shopping, the market, containment and protection from contaminants, a veil or shroud, suffocation, litter and pollution. The plastic shopping bag is the symbol for our times.

Young uses mirrors in many of her works, perhaps to capture a mise-en scene, to add another dimension to the light and to the picture-space itself, to suggest vanity, or to suggest reflection as contemplation. Her work tends to be autobiographical, but not in a direct way - the objects are metaphors and their inter-relationships suggest human interactions. For example, a depiction of tulips, crammed into a jam jar, closely framed by the picture space, can suggest the enclosure of the individual in a pressurised environment, their straight-stems suggesting a rigid demeanour. Young often uses the pomegranate, ripe and about to burst or bursting and spilling its seed. It represents the cycle of life - the seed creating the next generation of fruit, but here it represents voluptuousness itself. In one work she depicts three pomegranates- one ready to open, one opening and one fully open - the three stages of the climax in the life-cycle of the piece of fruit, perhaps representing a personal catharsis or epiphany. But it may also be the same pomegranate painted three times - at successive stages of its existence - to comment on painting as a record of events.

The metaphoric potential of Young's paintings elicits multiple meanings, adding a universality to the work. No object depicted in her work is without symbolic power. The edge of a table, for instance, can appear as a cliff edge. The creases in a table cloth suggest that it has been stored away, folded up, for a long period - something hidden that is now being brought out. There are flowers, in various stages of decay. She loves dead flowers, or rather, the death of flowers, how they change shape and texture, and how this process mimics the process of life. The life cycle of a flower, in a vase, epitomises life. The forms of flowers stand in for human feelings and character. They might be back lit, side lit, or front lit, to create the character and the context in which they exist.

Young loves light. Without it, we cannot see. She renders it in all its aspects - the coolness of natural light and the warmth of indoor, artificial light. The use of light creates shadows. Sometimes these are very dark and forbidding, almost overwhelming the object casting the shadow - the negative overwhelming the positive. It is also as if the light source is very small and close and intense, as is our gaze. Our subjective gaze can cast shadows where none might otherwise appear.

Her work is about interiors. There are no landscapes, and no portraits, at least, not in the traditional sense. In one work she has rendered a vase of flowers with a mirror in the background. In the mirror we see the right arm, hand and side of the painter - herself? This is a close as we might get. And in this glimpse, we are seeing her as part of her work, as an aspect of it, and it as an aspect of her. In the foreground, obscuring the vase, is a jar that has been used for paint, stained and marked with all kinds of colours. The jar's accidental, painterly character resonates with the decaying flowers, whose stems and petals wither and dry out in unpredictable ways. The jar also symbolises painting itself, and it resonates with the work's clean lines and careful technique. This jar is a chalice, and the painter is the priestess.

Windows also appear in her work - as light sources, as framing devices, perhaps as pathways to other worlds. In one work, she depicts the Grosvenor Hotel and Victoria Station in London, through a window with a vase of bright poppies in the foreground. But the only colour in the work is in the flowers - the rest of the work is in pale, almost bleached hues, suggesting that life resides in the flowers rather than in the city, or that our gaze should be directed wherever life and colour subsist. But this work can also suggest that we are overly self-absorbed. A window in a still-life represents an opportunity resisted. Here, we would rather admire the flowers, as they admire us, rather than confront the outside world.

Young is a wonderful painter. There is a lush creaminess in the texture of her surfaces. The detail is clearly but not overly rendered, the composition finely balanced, the story cleverly told. The charcoal grey frames highlight the colours and the arrangement of the contents of the picture. But though they might appear neutral, the frames convey a dark, brooding atmosphere to the work, intensifying its power.

The objects in these paintings are all familiar to us. But in these works we experience them anew, and they will never be the same for us again. And they are engaged in a dance, they create a language and relate a story which is for all of us.

Chris Reid, June 2001