Sally Osborn
Until December 23; doggerfisher, Edinburgh

Sally Osborn fairly gets around. The Glasgow-based artist has had six shows in the last two years, three of them solo. Earlier this year, she filled Dundee’s Cooper Gallery with rusty old metal tables and a dead tree, along with items of exquisite flimsiness. From that evocative exploration of growth and decay, the artist has now moved onto cleaner parlour-room territory.

Nothing in Osborn’s show at doggerfisher looks like it could withstand the slightest breeze. Leaving the dirt and rust behind her, Osborn has embraced the Orientalist leanings of the 19th century Aesthetic Movement, referencing most specifically the Anglo-Japanese furniture of AW Godwin, friend and supplier to James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde.

In the centre of the gloss grey floor, a flimsy wooden structure stands like a ship, or an oil-rig, out at sea. It is Godwin’s famous sideboard, bereft of its surfaces. Around the gallery walls hang flimsy bits of tissue paper, barely holding the weight of the watercolour paint which adorns and destroys them. Alongside are cylinders of paper and foil, like Chinese lanterns, spattered with splotches and drips of paint.

A foil tube, its watercolour decoration clinging tentatively to the repellent surface, looks like a precious piece of museum porcelain, doomed to suffer an accident of squashing, falling or rubbing, no matter how well it is looked after. Indeed everything here seems to be on self-destruct mode.

Two golden nuggets are fixed to the wall opposite. They might appear to be geological specimens, older than humanity itself, but they couldn’t be more flimsy. Made from hollow tin foil, they might float off their hooks at the slightest provocation, and crumple on impact with the ground. If you touched them, the yellow pigment, unhappy where it is, would come off on your hand.

The recurring image of a young boy’s face, happy and carefree, presses home this general feeling of transience. This show is brightly coloured and bittersweet, like a picked daisy. It’s pretty, but it’s already starting to die.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.11.04