Still Time - Katy Simpson, The New Room, Oisin Gallery

Carmel Benson, paintings, Hallward Gallery until December 9th

Deirdre McLoughlin, Peppercanister Gallery

One of Katy Simpson's acknowledged influences, Jean Luc Godard, famously remarked that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Her own work in her perfectly titled exhibition Still Time is in a sense all middle, eschewing closure of any kind, but it's not so much Godard that comes to mind in relation to it as another film-maker, Hitchcock. As her elliptical, evocative titles underline, her empty interiors are haunted, not by anything supernatural but by the ordinary, the mundane, infused with a sense of heightened, perhaps ominous significance, in a way that quietly suggests extremes of emotional experience.

The emphasis on film isn't incidental. She lays out the component panels of her paintings like storyboards and she draws freely on the conventions of film language. In terms of painting Luc Tymans is the most obvious influence, evident in her de-saturated colour, her use of oblique, fragmentary images, and her photographic and other secondary sources. Technically, Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas are also relevant. But Simpson learns from these various exemplars and goes on to make something of her own.

It can be a cop-out to use narrative conventions in an open-ended way, a mere lack, but in her case open-endedness is essential. It allows a vital ambiguity and leaves us reading and re-reading her images in hopes of getting a sense of what is going on, and it's not so much a question of deciding that for ourselves, more with absorbing the atmosphere, almost taking the emotional temperature of the work. In Let Me Know When You Wake, for example, the combination of images, of a telephone cord, a deserted corridor, a fragment of a prone male figure, and a corner of a window, is typical. Despite an abiding ambiguity, the eloquence of those empty spaces, and a sense of loss or absence, are unmistakable.

In her two exhibitions, one print, the other painting, Carmel Benson engages in a process of self-exploration. It may seem harsh, but it is also true, to immediately say that she could have accomplished the job more effectively in just one show. In both of them, as it is, repetition becomes a problem. There is the occasional feeling that she is merely shuffling the same elements around without any real development. A little editing would have been constructive, and showing prints and paintings side by side would have been not only perfectly acceptable, but might have sparked a useful, enlivening dialogue.

She uses colour very well in both shows, distributing a repertoire of tiny, simplified motifs to float against lush, enveloping backgrounds - oceans of time, perhaps. By rendering the motifs, like figure, boat, bird or flower, for example, in a faux-naif style it's as if she is recalling a distant innocence of vision, but she carries the story through from innocence to experience, outlining a life cycle from coitus, conception and birth right through to death. At its best the work achieves a quality of meditative reflection while retaining a realistic toughness of vision.

Deirdre McLoughlin is a ceramic artist, Dublin born but based in Amsterdam for the last decade. She makes spare, elegant forms, paying great attention to surface qualities.

Her sculptural vocabulary recalls Brancusi and perhaps Barbara Hepworth, but of course the mere mention of the word ceramic is sufficient in some circles to trigger the art versus craft debate. It is certainly true, as well, that some of McLoughlin's forms are recognisably derived from and related to vessel shapes but her concerns are at the sculptural end of any notional craft-decorative-sculptural continuum.

Here she extends those concerns in two directions. One is represented by a series of subtle and not-so-subtle biomorphic shapes suggestive of fragments of animal anatomy. The other is represented by two remarkable architectonic pieces, both called Mrs Bauhaus. These are extraordinarily pleasing objects, beautifully textured and clearly designed to make maximum use of the play of light, like miniature stage-sets, only for real - that is, they are not models of anything, they are just themselves, but have an almost monumental presence.