HELEN Sear is up to her tricks again.

At first sight, the images of skies and undulating hills in her Grounded series would do little more than entice a walking enthusiast to stride out briskly.

Look again, however, and this is a form of trick photography.

These are, in fact, animal landscapes comprised of two image layers, one an isolated section of an animal's body, such as a horse's back, the other a background of sky, the components brought together in a digital montage.

Shown together for the first time, the images of Grounded (2000-2002) move through seasons and emotions, always with a sense of harmony that suggests a contented union between the elements and the animal world.

They seem to be nature as nature intended and yet, ironically, these are manipulated, illusory images, imaginary landscapes, no more real than the fairy world in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Taken as a whole, these digital works reiterate the same point over and again, and frankly once you have had the trick played on you once there is nothing new to add. On reflection, it is the conceptual artist's way of saying 'never judge a book by its cover'.

By comparison, Sear's second landscape series, the new Still... A Landscape In Ten Pieces, is more imposing and disquieting. Where Grounded is at peace, here the order of natural things has been disturbed, not once but twice.

In Still, Sear presents ten photographic fragments taken from one negative: an image of an Alpine diorama - a miniature three-dimensional scene with figures - shot in a natural history museum in Darmstadt, Germany.

The diaroma has already re-assembled nature in still-life form in the somewhat incongruous arrangements of stuffed hares and birds, deer and bears on counterfeit rocks.

In the museum they are, indeed, still but once Sear sets to work on framing ten close-up images of her own, she creates mini-dramas.

Suddenly the hare's eyes are alive with fear, the bear smug in its physical superiority over all around him.

Where Grounded's images are fake but appear real, the museum landscapes are fake, frozen between life and death, but seem real in Sear's frames, still life de-frosted and brought to life again.

So, what does all this prove? Photography can lie as much as it can tell the truth in photojournalism; photographers can meddle like Puck and re-arrange nature's furniture.

Oh, and they can just make pretty pictures, if you wish to look no deeper.

Updated: 09:56 Friday, September 19, 2003