Arts editor, Pru Farrier, was invited to curate her own exhibition - Here's Looking at You - at the Zillah Bell Gallery. In return, she asked the gallery's John Bell to review a current exhibition

ONE of my favourite galleries is hidden away at Laurence Sterne's former home, Shandy Hall, which in the last four years has mounted shows by more than 20 Royal Academicians, including Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake and Alison Wilding, together with artists and illustrators of the calibre of Patrick Hughes, Andre Krauze (of The Guardian) and cartoonist Martin Rowson.

The theme of the present exhibition, Wings of Time, is a passage from Tristram Shandy beginning: "Time wastes too fast ..." in which Sterne's awareness that his life was to be short is underlined by his wish to live it to the full.

Central to the exhibition is a 15- minute film by Thomas Newton, who used his own ground-breaking editing techniques on film shot in Coxwold last year. The result is a humorous, poignant and often beautiful meditation on time, landscape and human mortality.

The winding of St Michael's Church clock by John Kendrew, who has kept Coxwold accurate to the second for the last 30 years, has some magical effects on the surrounding countryside: round haybales rotate, road signs revolve and a sundial disappears into an hourglass.

The film is brimful of memorable and poetic images, such as a stroboscopic flight of starlings or the transformation of drops of dew on a perfect spider's web into an elegant ruby necklace.

Other artists have responded to the theme in their own ways. Nigel Hutchinson's mural on the ceiling shows "light clouds of a windy day"; Tom Phillips captures the passage of time with a chronological collection of picture postcards, the same scene repeated over a hundred years; in her installation Dust to Dust, Carolyn Johnson has taken every instance of the words "you", "me" and "us" from Tristram Shandy and exhibits them in a showcase; while Les Coleman takes a Zen approach in his mirror which ticks like a clock, but tells no time.

The exhibition is open every day except Saturdays until June 23. The film Wings of Time is available on DVD. Catch it soon - life is short.

John Bell