At Least Four Cloves

Three heads of garlic sit on a crumpled paper bag, dropped onto grey paving stones. That is the whole show. The garlic still has its dried stalks attached, sticking up like pale yellow tails, and the papery skins catch a purplish tint where the light hits them. The bag has been opened and flattened out rather than unpacked properly, its creases painted as sharp facets of peach and rust.

Ella Williams works in oil with a loaded brush, laying down colour in blocks and leaving the strokes visible. You can see it best in the paving slabs, where each stone is a few decisive swipes of grey, green and blue, and in the ridged texture of the paint itself around the lower right corner. The approach owes something to painters like Euan Uglow and the Camberwell tradition of looking hard at ordinary objects, though there is nothing fussy about it. Shadows are treated almost as flat dark shapes, which gives the garlic real weight against the ground.

The title is a small joke aimed at anyone who cooks. Recipes ask for one or two cloves, and most people ignore that entirely. Painted at pavement level, looking down as though the shopping has just been set on the ground for a moment, it is a still life about the everyday business of feeding yourself.