Rich tapestry of finely crafted artworks

Visual Arts Scotland, an exhibiting society dedicated to applied art, craft and fine art, has occupied a position somewhere between the traditional “beaux arts” ethos of the Royal Scottish Academy and the experimentalism of the Society of Scottish Artists. In the past it was much associated with “hand craft” and the rather lumpen associations that term had, rather unfairly, accumulated.

But this is an invigorated organisation, with clear goals and intentions. It celebrates the idea (and the ideal) of the well made, while acknowledging the fluidity of contemporary thought in relation to object-making. The boundaries between fine art, manual crafts and applied art have, as the title of this show suggests, converged.

An artwork such as a tapestry or wall-hanging may therefore be presented and understood at a number of levels. The object can be well conceived, well made and pleasing to the eye, thus fulfilling the roles of decoration and function, as well as being thought-provoking. This certainly seems to be how a grouping of tapestries — all entrants for the international Cordis Prize, initiated by the novelist Ian Rankin and his wife Miranda Harvey, and now in its second year — have been conceived.

Marika Szàraz’s Heaven and Earth, with its black and grey geometries, indicates a fascination with surface, and the way light is absorbed by the density of the work. Misao Watanabe’s 5m-long Happiness exudes that quality, with vivid yellow imagery derived from a field of canola flowers.

The invited artists Steven MacIver and Andrew Mackenzie both explore the line and linear structure. MacIver works with gold, silver and copper thread and constructs 3D, large- scale “drawings” that combine the architectural and the organic.

Theo Shields’s work returns us to the visceral, the atavistic and the elemental. A woodworker’s bench, complete with tools, also houses a video screen showing two short films — about the furniture maker Chris Scotland and Fraser Waugh, the last trained green sand mouldmaker in Scotland. Shields has combined the raw materials used by these craftsmen and forced them into dialogue by pouring molten iron into chunks of hewn oak. The resulting works show a kind of trauma and beauty: the “negative” space of a hollowed-out tree trunk is now preserved in a “positive” iron object.

The show runs until February 20.