Cobbold herself is represented with three paintings. The animating spirit of one is a leaping, airborne poodle in differently restrained by a seated figure. Another shows a headless 'nike' holding aloft a flame. Perhaps the three utility wires sagging across this sky have been strung from Puvis de Chavannes' modern allegory called Physics. In Puvis's case the wires carry good and bad news, symbolised by two flying females.
Good news carries a golden bough.
In Cobbold's case the torch may be that of romantic love burdened with irony. The wires may be the stringed instrument accompanying that scrap of song. Her third painting pictures two figures posed with croquet mallets against a background of elevated highway. The game is their medium of exchange. Like the other two, this work is stagey and frigid, as if the artist is under the spell of that ever present encroachment of elevated highway, the sign of blighted urbanity.