For a dose of arresting art, see Nicola Hicks’s new solo show at Flowers Gallery in Kingsland Road. The British artist, who is best known for addressing the universal, often darker aspects of humanity through contemporary allegory, has unveiled something really quite extraordinary here. At the heart of Dump Circus is a large-scale installation casting the city as an urban wasteland, where the natural world has been ravaged by greed and waste.

Expect to see discarded objects scattered across the gallery floor, a bear mauling the ringmaster and a rearing horse on a gigantic rubber tyre. Look to the walls and you’ll come face to face with the glaring cats, dogs and horses depicted in her playful series of works on paper, recalling the exuberant designs of circus posters.

This is an engaging exhibition that will prompt you to consider the destructive impact of human activity on the environment as well as the irrepressible resilience of life on earth.

This solo show is brimming with complex ideas, thoughts and feelings. Not surprising, given it contains 12 paintings, 2 floor-based sculptures and 14 works on paper by Helen Marten, the Turner Prize winner best known for her smart use of metaphor and word play.

At the heart of the exhibition is an exploration of the body politic — and a giant metal stick figure prone on the floor. Elsewhere, you’ll see everything from multi-layered abstract works and an embossed bar of soap to fragmented body parts glossed with words by WH Auden, American novelist William H Gass and Marten herself. You’ve guessed it — nothing is quite what it appears.

‘This was meant to be a really simple show: literally just paintings on walls,’ Marten told Frieze Magazine. ‘But, whenever I try to make deliberately smaller works, it just becomes an aggregation of parts and ideas such that it simply has to expand. When meaning twists into a constellation with something else like a knot, it’s incredibly theoretically satisfying.’

There’s a lot to unriddle here but persevere and you’ll reap the rewards. Catch it before it closes at the end of the month.