LONDON—It’s nearly June and the London art scene is heating up. I’ve spent the week working my way up the art-market feeding chain, from the first of the graduate work being displayed at degree shows to über-gallery White Cube’s new exhibition.

Queuing in the rain for the opening of the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) sculpture show was very well worth it; everyone I spoke to agreed that it was a particularly strong show this year.

Standouts were Frances Richardson’s two installation pieces and one huge pencil-on-paper drawing of such minute detail it is virtually impossible to photograph.

The largest installation featured a plyboard beam with what looked like flooring samples flowing over it, with more flooring samples flowing across the floor and a ripped piece of linoleum leaning against a wall. It is virtually impossible to describe the sense of lucidity and quiet this work engendered in the viewer.

Richardson told me that it was inspired by the illness and death of her father “which took three years but was a calm and beautiful experience.”

This majestic installation has already won a Conran Foundation Award.

The second of Richardson’s installations took the form of a plyboard carpenter’s table with a twisted, porcelain dagger balanced on the edge of it, giving a sense of precarious danger and violence at odds with the larger installation.

Tom Price has been working in high-definition videos, some of which formed part of his show. But he has moved on to start making exquisitely detailed, very tiny, bronze portrait heads; he showed just one at the RCA show—patinated in white and no more than three inches high. I will be reporting more fully on this new work later; it is well worth watching.

Katrina Palmer’s equally tiny crumpled and lead-smudged piece of white paper also turned out, on very close scrutiny, to be another tiny bronze which I loved (and bought). Her other standout work was a multi-colored globe made out of Plasticine which sat, like a spent meteorite, on the floor.

And Kris Emmerson’s digital animations of amorphous, botanical shapes played on DVD players and TVs, set by Emmerson within the sculptural context of wooden-cage forms—taking both sculpture and computer-imagery into a new area.

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Next up was a studio visit to the East End to preview work by two artists who have already had shows, but do not have galleries as yet.

Olly Clegg, a painter, and Alastair Mackie, a sculptor, will be showing together at the end of June. My advice? Like collector David Roberts, who has already been and bought, get there before the show to avoid the waiting list (their work can be seen from June 27 at No. 10 Marshalsea St, SE1).

Mackie’s sculpture is all based on earthy, natural elements inspired by his childhood on a farm in Cornwall. The complex construction of these pieces descends from his obsessive, childhood preoccupation with model-making.

Huge casts of the U.S. Capitol and of the Seagram Building in New York (in editions of three) are executed in horsehair and lathe (ancient building materials). A pile of plates are made out of swallow’s nests (Alastair assured me they were deserted when he found them); and what looked like a Chinese birdcage made of ivory turned out to be constructed of thousands of mice leg bones he had found in owls’ nests on the farm.

Helmets are another strand in Mackie’s work: A fighter pilot’s helmet is cast in bright pink soap and an American infantry helmet is cut out into complex lacy patterns with advanced laser technology.

But a group of human skulls set with flat plates of turquoise or coral, with fighter-pilot motifs had a numinous, jewelled presence—Mackie cites the influence of ancient Aztec artifacts. Charles Saatchi bought an early piece in this series, and I am not surprised.

Clegg’s work explores what he terms old-fashioned painting in oil; his subject matter is childhood. Earlier paintings were extremely sinister still-life portraits of childish toys, teddy bears, dolls and stuffed rabbits, abandoned on alien worlds in deep, black space.