HELEN Brigham stands by her bed."I'm very interested in blurring the boundaries of comfort and discomfort," she says.

The bed has a bespoke mattress, courtesy of York Bedding Co, and the high-sided wooden frames of a cot. "I haven't yet tried to sleep in it, but it is particular to my shape and height," says the slim, 5ft 9in Helen. "I think, to complete the work, it'll be important for me to experience what it's like lying inside there."

The reason she is yet to do so is practical. Indeed by comparison with climbing into that bed, it was probably easier to lower her Bedstead piece from her top-floor workshop through the trapdoor and pulley system at the Tower, the contemporary visual arts space she co-founded this year with fianc Mark Jacobs in the 500-year-old Postern Tower.

For Helen's bed is in the shape of a sarcophagus. "What was once homely becomes unhomely," she says of her narrow, imprisoning coffin for the living. "I'm dealing with feelings of construction and claustrophobia, hence the coffin shape. With a bed you bring in so many aspects, because it's the place of sleep and death, birth and death."

Helen talks of contrast, of feeling her inner self kick against her "blessed life of relative ease and comfort", as that comfort encloses her and her "resting place crowds around me, as if I'm being buried alive".

That explains the Tenderness Of Pain exhibition title too, a title that appears outwardly to be contradictory; the stuff of analysis for Sigmund Freud and his couch. Jointly selected by the exhibition's four Yorkshire artists - Brigham; co-curator Graham Martin, of York art punk movement ROTA (Return Of The Artist); Morwenna Catt, from Bradford; and Christine Fowler, from Leeds - the work "deals with the personal".

For all Helen's beatific disposition as she guides you around the peace and calm and solitude of The Tower, happiness does not abound in these works. Endearing objects, be it a bed, or Catt's soft-toy rabbits, Fowler's multiple-personality dolls or Graham Martin's family photographs, take on a disturbing quality, albeit not as extreme as the Chucky doll in the Child's Play movie series.

These pieces do what cutting-edge art should do. They make you look anew at the familiar, just like Dadaism and surrealism, Carl Andre's bricks or Damien Hirst's farm animals in formaldehyde. They affirm too that old fitness coach mantra: no pain, no gain.

The Tower is open 11am to 5.30pm, Wednesday to Sunday.

Updated: 11:53 Tuesday, July 29, 2003