ON EDGE
Until December 5; Travelling Gallery
(See www.travellinggallery.com for details of tour)

It’s not so much a motoring experience as a sea-faring one, when you board the bus for the Travelling Gallery’s latest exhibition. The gallery celebrates 30 years on the road with a thoughtful show about the sea, with seven contemporary artists from Scotland and abroad.

I step onto the bus in Penicuik’s High Street, but within seconds I am transported onto a ferry somewhere in the salty Atlantic. This is no glib trick, but the cumulative effect of Dalziel + Scullion’s plaintive Rattray foghorn (mounted on the back of the bus), the sloshing waves of Céline Duval’s DVD soundtrack, and the quiet vibration of the bus’s hidden generator.

If this show was to be represented by a boat, it would indeed be a ferry. Absent are the romantic, hazy seascapes, sunset simmering, waves tinkling on the shore. Here is the sea as experienced by people who really live with it, and travel across it to get from A to B.

Dalziel + Scullion’s short film, The Pressure Of Spring, bounces through the working lives of young men on the North East coast, relishing every visual detail. One of the duo’s first films, it’s fresh and unselfconscious compared with their more recent, studied works.

Another video, embedded into the gallery wall, provides a hypnotically authentic view of the sea, not from the shore but from the deck of the Mull ferry. For Richard, by ts Beall, is dominated by the green ramp which forms the front of the boat. Through tiny slits in the ramp, and a small space on either side, land bobs partially into view. Peering through this workaday peephole, you are a part of the landscape, and not just a distant viewer.

There’s more than new media in this small but varied exhibition; there are also photographs, drawings, sculpture and sketchbooks. Thomas Joshua Cooper combines many layers of time in his single photograph of Diamond Rock, Findhorn. Each aged crack in the mossy rock is delineated with precision. Beyond, the sea is a mass of curling and streaking lines, drawn into abstraction over the time it took to expose.

Thurso-born Charlotte Watters adds a blast of colour to a show which is otherwise fairly restrained. Her wall drawing, at first sight spontaneous and straightforward, is a sophisticated blend of techniques and clever suggestion.

I step off the bus, the sound of the swell still swishing in my ears. A lonely foghorn sounds. And then the traffic lights. There I am again, in land-locked Penicuik.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.09.08