Packing cases, hammers, pieces of wood, and other paraphernalia were strewn around when I arrived at Christ Church Picture Gallery last week. The college’s three fine art undergraduates from the Ruskin School of Art were setting up their show. Was this one of the artworks, I wondered?

It was, if not quite ready. James Sutton, a second-year student from London, whose work was to sit there on the carpet in the middle of the main gallery surrounded by Old Masters in gilded frames, explained. His work was untitled, yet had everything to do with the title of the show: Rules of the Game. He aims to challenge the ‘rules’, the norms of exhibitions; he wants us to see exhibitions as a game, how we react in characteristic ways, attach worth and value. Using “the standard institutional tools” of exhibitions, the packing cases, frames, screens — left empty — he emphasises “practices often dislocated from an artwork’s meaning”.

Outside in the corridor was Palimpsest Memory Echo Ghost, three monochrome Giclée prints by third-year student Claire-Louise Shifrin from Oxford. The title encapsulates the concept. Her extraordinary photographs of a bed sheet, in use since the 1920s, turn a darn, its reverse, a corner of the sheet stitched with the owner’s name, into something poetic. “I like those things which are remnants, overlooked, everyday – they have their own lyricism,” she said.

In a pleasing twist of fate, the name on the sheet ‘A. N. Hutt’ evokes the ‘R. Mutt’ signature on Duchamp’s ‘readymade’.

Cara George, from Rutland, a first-year student, showed me three white forms in acrylic delicately balanced on welded steel pedestals. She had them lined up, one catching the light on the windowsill, leaning gently upwards towards the others, taller, fragile, virtually invisible, impossibly balanced. Made without adhesive, just heat, they spoke of balance, tension, visibility and invisibility. Playfulness too: in the making and exhibiting, they were “on the brink of being destroyed”.

n Until June 16.