Raising The Bar: Influential Voices In Metal
Until September 27; Dovecot

Eskimo
Until August 31; The Gallery at Eskmills

Richard Wilson
Until August 31; The Grey Gallery

It’s easy to imagine, despite builders scurrying around behind the scenes, that the two immaculate galleries at Dovecot have been around for years. In fact, until recently, they were part of a Victorian bath house.

The only clue to the north gallery’s history is a row of deep-set, arched windows, built small for modesty’s sake, as this was once the ladies’ pool. Now transformed, it contains a pristine selection of metalwork, brought together by a new organisation dedicated to promoting high quality crafts, IC: Innovative Craft.

Raising The Bar showcases the best artists working in metal today. One – Malcolm Appleby – lives in Scotland, while others come from all over the world. Functional teapots mix with objects of no fixed use, and with others which cling half-way between the two extremes.

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray contributes four gleaming silver objects whose usefulness teeters on the precipice of art for art’s sake. Found objects such as candlesticks are hammered out of shape until they appear to melt into their own thick, glossy pool of silver gloop. They are sensuous and entertaining; the work of a great story-teller.

Although silver dominates the exhibition, Mimlitsch-Gray’s are among the few that actually shine. Michael Rowe puts thick, matt sheets of the stuff on a par with aluminium treadplate, and David Huycke’s scientific structures are made deliberately to resemble lead.

By contrast, Tore Svensson spends months of hard labour on each of his iron bowls, which require thousands of hammer blows to achieve the perfect shape. It is this dedication which makes his pitch-black dishes precious, despite the baseness of the material, and the simplicity of their form.

Such issues of functionality and precious materials are explored with great care, but are often bypassed by followers of fine art. Now that IC: Innovative Craft is established in Dovecot, debates like these will be hard to ignore.

Just beyond the city limits in Musselburgh lies another breath-taking new space which is set to take Edinburgh’s art scene by storm. A 19th century fishing net factory, built around a grand courtyard, has been redeveloped as office space with a stylish restaurant in the centre. The last piece of the master plan has just slotted into place, with the inauguration of The Gallery At Eskmills.

The gallery runs the length of the courtyard, occupying the roof space of the old factory. It’s industrial, with concrete floors and iron girders, but at the same time it’s intimate, with sloping wooden roof-beams and natural daylight. Split into two rooms, the first has walls built in. The second, larger gallery has almost nowhere to put pictures, but acres of floor-space for sculptures and installations.

Local outfit Polarcap are the curators of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Eskimo. They took the deliberate decision to mount a non-thematic show, inviting 14 artists to respond to the space as they saw fit. The result is eclectic, and not entirely satisfying, with no unifying theme, little sign of anything site-specific, and no interpretation.

Eskimo does, however, introduce us to some fascinating artists from home and abroad. Hendrikje Küehne and Beat Klein make stunning collaged landscapes, plundering famous paintings to create scenes more implied than explicit. Ian Patterson’s All The Munroes sneaks nature-loving, hand-crafted detail into an ostensibly minimalist sculpture.

Trine Pederson’s furry Rain Stones make a cheerful splash in the large gallery, while her paintings are squeezed unhappily into a tight space across the courtyard. Not for the first time, the late Ian Hamilton Finlay finds himself grouped amongst the young and happening next generation, the Peter Pan of Scottish art.

The nomadic Grey Gallery this year returns to a soon-to-be-demolished art warehouse in the New Town, to showcase the work of Richard Wilson. Nominated twice, 20 years ago, for the Turner Prize, Wilson’s ambitious architectural interventions have seen him half-fill a room with reflective sump oil and cut a slice out of a boat near the Millennium Dome.

There’s nothing quite as spectacular at The Grey Gallery, but Wilson’s return to sculpture gives us a crumpled burger van which on closer inspection is spotlessly new. Crafted from plywood, like a vorticist sculpture with incidental wheels and tow-bar, Hot Dog Roll conflates ideas of construction and destruction.

Four films document some of Wilson’s most daring destruction constructions of recent times. Turning The Place Over is a beautiful reminder of the artist’s ostentatious installation in Liverpool, in a which a 3-storey circle, sliced out of a building’s façade, rotates in its original place.

Meter’s Running subjects you to 14 minutes of grinding claustrophobia, as the artist grunts, drills and saws his way through a taxi from front to back. Break Neck Speed is a truly magical little film which is best left as a surprise. Just go see.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.08.08