Michael Landy: Four Walls @ Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 16 Jun

You mightn’t think one photograph, four drawings and a video could cause you to consider both your relationship with your parents and the simultaneous dignity and futility of pouring your life’s work into maintaining a family home. But Michael Landy’s Four Walls – bringing together a handful of 2004 works paying homage to the artist’s father, John Landy, a miner and a resourceful man who prided himself on his ingenuity around the home but who, at 37, suffered debilitating spinal injuries in a tunnel collapse – is as moving as it is minimal.

The show’s centrepiece is the half-hour Four Walls video, projected onto a screen hanging in the empty centre of the building’s wide entrance gallery and soundtracked by the trilling of Landy Sr’s whistling as he potters around his property. Comprising a series of stills – photos and instruction manual-style diagrams coloured in the flat, subdued shades of a Ladybird manual – it serves as both an appreciative presentation of his father’s dedication to DIY, and a non-accusatory but nonetheless palpable comment on the ultimate impossibility of achieving the ‘ideal’ home: rogue shots show cracks appearing, damp rising, chair legs succumbing to wobble.

Across the room, the photo, Semi-detached – John and Ethel Landy, depicts Landy’s parents standing modestly by the near-perfect rendering of the front facade of their home that the artist installed in Tate Britain in 2004. Despite its unceremonious pebbledash, peeling paint and drizzle-grey voile, the house’s flashes of ‘fancy’ – a grand wedge of stone step, a brass lion's head doorknocker – nod to its inhabitants’ diligence and stoicism. Equally vocal in their simplicity are the four coloured pencil studies, from the series Welcome to my World – built with you in mind, of items owned by John Landy, including a VHS video cassette label (its rust and gold design holding unexpected nostalgia) and a still-packaged plumb bob set. The ‘Re-order’ number, printed in red across its plastic, is suddenly upsetting in the knowledge that Landy, placing this on his shelf after his accident, wouldn’t need to.

The exhibition’s emotional pull lies in the echoing quality of the artist’s exercise: in thoughtfully filing and presenting his father’s odds and ends, Landy reflects the same care and precision that his father would have applied to using them.