Alan Alborough has titled neither the exhibition nor the pieces on this show at the University of Stellenbosch Gallery. Typically, he has said nothing at all. The viewer, I guess, is supposed to extrapolate. While there may be a little of "it's whatever you want it to be", I reckon that Alborough is talking another language, one which strikes at the very heart of anyone's attempt to interpret his work.

One tendency when looking at his work is to very literally liken its appearance to something else. One can also look at the processes he employs and the materials he uses and attempt to extract some meaning. Somehow, I believe, such interpretation both falls short of and overshoots the mark. Alborough instead questions the very notion of our perception of his work. Through his unfamiliar constructions and combinations, Alborough initiates an unstoppable process in a viewer - one cannot help but attempt to interpret his work; visually, verbally and intellectually. Our perception longs for a landmark in the slippery and uncertain landscape of Alborough's installations. Without a referent we seem unable to experience his work.

A persistent and chaotic metallic sound drifts down from the gallery above your head as you enter the exhibition space. On the floor in front of you is a construction which clearly reproduces the tracery of the pointed-arch windows lining either side of the building (a converted church), although these are covered to prevent much light coming in (I suspect a little less light would lend more ambience to the show). On the low podium at the far end of the building is a similar construction which mirrors the simple rose window behind you. Nothing too out of the ordinary yet.

Light, however, is provided by lights rigged inside opaque white plastic toolboxes. There is in fact, nothing too unusual about the materials Alborough has used to fabricate the constructions before you either - injection-moulded shower mats, cable ties, plastic cotton reels and the protective plastic caps from roofing nails. Unusual and original though is the use to which these materials are put and their apparently coincidental compatibility. The aforementioned plastic caps fit snugly between nodes on the plastic mats; these are pierced by long nails that fit neatly through the centre of the cotton reels which hold the plastic mats one above the other. This makes a plastic sandwich, drooping slightly on the corners where it is unsupported.

Wire joins the protruding nails above, which also hold the constructions off the floor, resting on absorbent sheets of white non-woven fabric placed there. The rose window-like form rests on the fabric, which has been soaked in a solution, and the connected nails have a current passing through them into the layered sheets. This causes the nails to corrode, making a loose rendering of the image they demarcate in metallic grey and red colours, which spread aureole-like around the nails. It is an amplified recording of this corrosion process, a sort of metallic crackling, which we are listening to. Eventually a blurred, bleeding reproduction of the rose window will be produced, and will, I presume, be exhibited, possibly over the very window from which the form is derived.

Alborough will do the same with the other constructions. The images will still retain traces of the nails in position in stains whose tone and hue change as they drift away from the nail head. The symmetry of the rose window image and the nature of the marks, making it up, seem to hint at the famous marks of a Rorschach test. This, I believe, is a red herring Alborough places in our way, inviting us to comparison, metaphor and likeness in interpretation of his work.

In the other large room of the gallery, Alborough has placed a long sheet of absorbent paper. On this is an arrangement of straight lines, circles and semi-circles. These are made of blue or white plastic clothes pegs, cable ties, nails and wire. The image the units make is like that on the invitation - apparently a circuit-like configuration of paths, nodes and ports. To resort to the use of metaphor, this seems to allude to the current that eventually passes through this construction causing the corrosion and making the images I have described above on the paper. Themes seem to run through the show - accumulation, current, flow, exchange between negative and positive, amongst others.

The chaotic soundtrack and the relatively uncontrolled nature of the corrosion the works produce stand out against the highly ordered nature of the materials Alborough uses, the complexity and rigorousness of his constructions, and the elaborate choreography he goes through to realise his works.

One is drawn to the cliché "Rust never sleeps", but this is perhaps another decoy laid by the artist to entice us to use metaphor in description of his work. The themes around which Alborough may have constructed this work are not specific, but rather general and universal - the co-existence of negative and positive, order and disorder, entropy and growth are really subject to any number of interpretations.

Alborough's work is also confounding in the way in which it straddles function and aesthetics. Why is such acute aesthetic attention given to what is essentially a machine to produce images? Why does something so apparently carefully considered and beautiful need to function? Which is really the product? Do the toolboxes function as lights or the lights moonlight as toolboxes? Alborough of course offers no clues, nor seems to claim any more attachment to any one part of the process. Are the machines in the service of Alborough, does a subject produce an object in which process the machine is intermediary?

Perhaps the work is pure function, independent of agent and product, and perhaps it is pure aesthetic independent of reference. Although this seems impossible to grasp, perhaps it offers a clue to a reading of Alborough's work. It aims to bypass interpretation by reference, metaphor, aphorism symbol or subjectivity. It seeks to stand completely independent of subjective pointedness but remains aesthetically acute and functionally precise.

These large and elaborate constructions are beautiful, confounding and revelatory. They shed light on the tools of interpretation we are so accustomed to using, drawing attention to the devices we rely on to interpret images, objects and processes. At the exhibition's opening, the gallery was full of people which seemed to negate the intimacy the work really needed - I would really have loved an opportunity to not think about it by myself.