It's not often that I pay much attention to artist's statements. I usually read them, but not too deeply, for fear of having my own opinions and feelings washed away or subverted. But I was so overwhelmed by the desperate force of Lynette Morris-Hale's artist's statement that I read the whole thing. And I probably shouldn't have.

The figures which constitute Morris-Hale's body exhibition called 'Targeted', currently on show at Artisan Gallery in Florida Road, speak of vulnerability and sadness and the last vestiges of hope. Delicately glazed ceramic figures with thin, flat bodies and mostly wan, tearful faces. Some of them are suspended from the wall, their arms and legs immobile, others occupy little rowing boats filled with baggage. Some of them wear A-line skirts with little targets on them which contain the European iconography of semi-rural pastoral scenes and the voyages of discovery. Some of them timidly wear or hold the new South African flag or cling to a little rainbow. And some of them are pointing a gun at the viewer.

They are clearly about being threatened as a white woman in the new South Africa, about vulnerability and violence and the possibilities of departure and counter-violence as responses. The artist's statement bears this out: 'My ancestors stirred their culture in with the people of South Africa, and this mixture became my culture. I now feel that some of these values are under assault (as did black people under apartheid ' the boot is now on the other foot). I am trying to come to terms with the violence, the assault on good solid values like hard work and respect. I show how leaving one's country for another place that one has distant ties with is very difficult in the heart.' There is much to unravel and comment on in this statement but I'll settle for pointing out that 'stirred in their values' is the most bloodless euphemism I've heard for centuries of bloody colonialism.

Morris presents a world in which whiteness is marginalised. And indeed it should be in a country with a black African majority. But my own experience of life in contemporary South Africa reveals a country where many people in nearly all demographic groups ' bar perhaps the economically enfranchised black African youth of Gauteng ' feels disenfranchised and marginalised both by society and by their government. And neither is the South African cliché of emigration limited to the white middle-class. I have met many South Africans of all colours and classes who want to leave here, convinced that things are better elsewhere. (Equally I have met many South Africans of all colours who couldn't imagine living anywhere else).

These things might seem out of place in an art review but they are the pragmatic kind of conversation that the work invokes. The poor, frightened white woman backed up against a wall, holding a gun she doesn't look like she knows how to use: Morris-Hale's sculptures are both highly caricatured and imbued with deep affection. But there is caricature too in the thoughts which inform the exhibition, although that caricature is subconscious.

Hale talks about how Dadaism challenged the artistic hegemony of the time with irreverence and deconstruction. 'They [the Dada artists] ridiculed these values by reading poetry backwards and by spurning the order of rhythm in music by banging on a piano. These Dada artists used garbage as material for sculpture instead of the time-honoured tradition of noble materials like marble and bronze. Is this where our black South Africans are coming from?'

This is an interesting ' if highly flawed ' argument, and as much as Dadaism sent the entire corpus of Western art flying in a different direction, it should make sense that democratic black rule should indeed deconstruct former undemocratic white rule. And to treat the surreality of apartheid with anything but ridicule would in itself be ridiculous.

But Morris-Hale seems to view the shift from apartheid to the new South Africa as a simple reversal of value systems. She forgets the sheer scale of human suffering that took place, the sheer number of people displaced, lives lost and families broken, the deep unhappiness burned into the experience of being a South African of any colour.

And when she writes on the front of one of the two 'black' sculptures that are included in the exhibition that 'Winnie's necklace still rules the land', she plays perfectly into the thought patterns of whiteness, seeing only Madikizela-Mandela's notoriety, blind to her extraordinary compassion for working people and ' importantly ' blind to the massive contradictions that must of necessity haunt any liberation movement that transforms into a government.

But I chose to review Morris-Hale's work not because I was offended by what she had to say but because I was, for the most part, so moved by what she had produced. Her simple figures with their flat-rectangle stomachs and their broken smiles carry an extraordinary amount of pathos in them. Their fragile bodies seem about to break from the pressures of this world, even as they continue to smile, sometimes blankly, sometimes filled with hope.

Life in South Africa is emotionally weighty if you're paying any attention to what's going on around you, and there are certainly days when I feel very much like one of her figures, backed into a corner, about to break. But I don't feel that way because I'm white. I feel that way because I'm human, and I suspect that, despite the harsh, desperate words of her artist's statements, the same might be true for Morris-Hale.

But the presence of the two black figures included in the exhibition moves back to the darkness. They were apparently the first two figures produced for the show and they contain no empathy, only grotesquery. Nearly a century after Heart of Darkness, this is a bit much. Read in conjunction with the rest of the pieces, they deny blackness humanity and fragility. Perhaps they were simply starting pieces that catalysed the rest of the body of work but were in fact conceptually separate. If that is the case they should not have been exhibited together with the other works. If they do indeed form part of the exhibition's narrative, then it is one with which I can only remain deeply uncomfortable.

The intense and frightened humanity revealed in many of the other works show Lynette Morris-Hale to be a caring and feeling human being. And I know I sound like a preacher here, but I can't help thinking that if she could drop the scales of race from her eyes, she might find the possibility of experiencing the connective pleasure of humanity that it is, at least some of the time, one of the joys of living in the new South Africa.