Kate Scrivener began to wonder why the men's gloves she found In the V&A were all so narrow and dainty. This was, she realised, because they were made largely for show, as signifiers of wealth, as love tokens and wagers. Finding their theatrical quality seductive, she made Guard, based on an example from the early 16oos, which wittily plays with notions of confrontation. The forefinger of Scrivener's glove has been elongated and covered with painted text appropriated from fragments of overheard arguments. The piece is phallic, confrontational and absurd, as, indeed, Is the very melodramatic act of throwing down a gauntlet as a wager. In Growth, also based on an early 17th century glove, all the digits have been elongated and the small blue text used here refers to lies and untruths. That these narrow gloves were made for men who could never actually wear them, highlights notions of artifice and deception. References to fairy tales abound - Plnocchio's nose extended when he told lies and only Cinderella's foot would fit Into the glass slipper that was too small for her inauthentic ugly sisters. Scrivener's third piece makes reference to a Chantilly black silk bobbin lace cap, dated around 1860. Here the lace design has been replaced with text that alludes to both romance and love. A question perhaps, here, of the head ruling the heart.

Jane Langley's work closely mirrors her life both as a mother and an artist. Using as her starting point the silk designer, Anna Maria Garthwaite, who worked In Spltalflelds from 17281756, Langley has made paintings that have evolved from a single photographic image of a celebratory bunch of flowers. This she has projected and drawn onto panels. The dimensions of her paintings, which are displayed in box frames to emphaslse their 'object like' qualities, are taken from domestic stair treads, which for Langley, create a potent symbol of confinement and domesticity. In deciding to make small works at home, she began, consciously, to ally herself to the tradition of female craft such as embroidery and to question the heroic tradition of male painting. That museum textiles tend to be locked away to preserve them from light mirrors the 19th century notions of repressed female soclabllty and sexuality. In her paintings Langley's appropriations create a circular return to visibility of that which has been rendered Invisible, In contrast to women of Garthwaite's era, for whom their craft would have formed an organic part of a structured and ordered life, Langley's work highlights - with its fragmented appropriations - the chaotic, the eclectically postmodern concerns of a contemporary woman artist.

Jennifer Wright is another artist whose work has been affected by the duality of motherhood and her creative practice. Her earlier series of painted diptychs, based on the complex images of the 18th century textile designer, William Kilburn, reflected elements of hybridity and fragmentation. For this exhibition she has moved from painting to create an illusionistic tapestry made of Hama beads, a children's plastic toy. Displayed in a cabinet under the low lighting of the gallery, the piece, made of sixteen tiles to form a sheet, becomes a jewellike simulacrum of a richly worked embroidery, Wright turned to this material because of Its connections with the domestic, for Its construction echoed the mindless repetition of sewing and stitching that enslaved previous generations of women, and makes reference to a bland, predominantly middle-class Laura Ashley aesthetic. The shift, from the discreet tones of traditional embroidery that disappear modestly in a domestic space, to the use of brashly luminous colour Is deliberately confrontational and changes the nature of the relationship of the object to the space that It Inhabits. The bl-Iateral splits that previously preoccupied Wright In the diptychs have now been emphaslsed in the surface of her work through the use of colour, so that a polarity is established between what is foregrounded and what recedes.

Helen Ireland has visited the V&A for many years, especially when she was a student. In the past she has made drawings from the wrought iron and filigree collection and indian miniatures. She has also had an abiding fascination with the organic designs of WIlliam Morris, whO claimed that, 'Nature Is an obvious source of inspiration, not to be copied literally, but to be imitated', and has become particularly Interested In the underlying geometric grid that appears to underpin his work. In recent years she has concentrated on a series of drawings, which explore the repetition, structure and division of Images. Her work Is not representational but Inspired by real things, from the organic structure of plants, landscapes and seascapes, through to what is man-made. A series of bird tracks become a form of subtle calligraphy, while seed heads of Honesty, drawn in pencil and gouache, expose the natural engineering of the plant. By using Japanese paper, which she cuts then overlaps, different focal points and depths are created. These modest, quiet works echo something of the stillness of Agnes Martin's poetic grids. Made like a lattice, one structure reveals a second negative structure beneath, so that it might be said that the past echoes the present and the representational Informs the abstract. In her latest work she has introduced sandblasted glass and used Images of oak leaves from a number of diverse sources such as Kew Gardens and William Morris designs as well as leaves affected by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.

Much contemporary art and culture apparently owes no allegiance to the past and appears concerned only with what Is current and voguish. The work of these five artists illustrates that history Is relevant, that It makes a narrative coherence of our lives. For what these artists have done is find ways of multiplying and diversifying the representations of the past so as to create new codes and new languages that link us to history but move us further into our own creative present.