Jodie Carey at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park

I spent yesterday scrutinizing exquisite 18th Century Chinese Imperial jade carvings that came up for auction at Duke's saleroom in Dorchester (which I reported on here). I got back to London in time to attend the opening of a new exhibition of work by the hugely talented young British artist Jodie Carey at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park (left). It was like going from the sublime to the sublime.

Carey is a proper sculptor. I first saw her work in 2009 at the then new Rick Mather-designed Towner in Eastbourne where she had occupied the gallery's vast second-floor gallery. Her installation, entitled 'In the Eyes of Others', comprised three massive chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, each weighing a tonne and constructed from 9,000 plaster casts of human bones (below right).

On the floor of the darkened gallery, cardboard boxes and stacks of old newspapers had been arranged in piles. The room temperature had been purposely chilled and the chandeliers spotlit to create an unsettling atmosphere.

Jodie Carey In the Eyes of Others

For me it recalled the palaeontology displays in natural history museums, but it also conjured the doomed rococo exuberance of ancien régime France. One imagined oneself walking through the deserted corridors of a Belle Epoque mansion occupied by an invading army long departed. Like the chandeliers — a form of decorative lighting now rarely seen except in stately homes or ambassadorial residences — the conjunction of stacks of old newspapers signalled a tradition now threatened by a new regime of technological communications. It all added up to a richly evocative and haunting mise en scène.

At that time Carey was not long out of art school. This was a seriously impressive display.

Born in Eastbourne, Carey grew up in the East Sussex town of Battle before studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, South East London. She graduated in 2007 from the Royal College of Art with an MA in sculpture and her work now appears in a number of prominent UK collections, including the Saatchi Collection, the David Roberts Collection and with the London and Swiss dealers Hauser and Wirth. (The chandelier installation was bought by an American private collector.)

Her new show at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea, entitled 'Somewhere, Nowhere', is another thoughtful and beautifully made body of work. The show opens with one of Carey's extraordinary hand-made vases of flowers (left), a fragile construction in plaster, wire, chiffon and lace that looks as if it might disintegrate under the faintest breath of air. I saw one of this series at a group show entitled 'Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures' at 33 Portland Place last October when it more than held its own against the noisier works in the main rooms, despite being secreted away  beneath the stairs.

The Untitled vase piece in the Battersea show is juxtaposed against wall panels stencilled in cigarette ash with a repeating pattern imitating flock wallpaper. That theme of transience is a recurring motif in Carey's work and she continues to find new and emotionally affecting ways of exploring it.

Jodie Carey, Untitled (Blood Dust), 2011

Untitled (Blood Dust), (right) which occupies a room on the first floor, is a carpet of dried blood, the glittering, spangled surface of which shimmers in the sunlight pouring through the gallery window. Its carefully crafted bevelled edge gives the illusion of it being embedded into the floor or sewn like the hem of a rug. It is hypnotically beautiful.

Upstairs Carey has devoted two galleries to her series of plaster panels (at least I assume they are plaster). Their pristine white surfaces are smeared and fissured in places to reveal an internal layer of delicate filigree as if a fragment of net curtaining had been immured beneath a blanket of snow. You have to get up close and personal to these panels to appreciate their whispered intimacies.

Like her Eastbourne show, the current exhibition reveals Carey as a thoughtful and conscientious practitioner capable of embedding her ideas in beautifully crafted objects. The strength of the underlying ideas is always crucial, but it's the material result that counts in sculpture. On that measure, Carey qualifies as one of the most talented young artists working today.

Somewhere, Nowhere is at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 until 19 June. Admission free