This year’s show offers a wealth of drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, jewellery and other applied arts

Visual Arts Scotland has done much in recent years to cast off its home-spun, “craftsy” image and to become a progressive artistic forum, showing work in a range of media across the fine and applied arts. It has gone from strength to strength under the presidency of Robbie Bushe, the painter. This year’s show offers a wealth of drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, jewellery and other applied arts.

As in previous years artists from other countries have been invited, such as Lucía Gómez, a Spanish artist based in Dundee, and Susan O’Byrne, originally from Cork, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1999. She fashions intricately constructed animal figures by first creating a wire armature (described as “three-dimensional line drawing”) on to which she applies thin sheets of paper clay. This is then surfaced with printed and patterned layers of paper-porcelain. Her work refers to family and to identity. An installation here, consisting of dozens of different animal heads, is labelled with the names of family members, who originally came from the Black Forest in Germany. The patterning on the fine ceramic surface is derived from traditional domestic needlepoint, an expression of the skill and identity of O’Byrne’s female ancestors.

Jewellery, another art form more traditionally associated with women, is well represented. Makers such as Evgeniia Balashova, Becca Pollard, Jo Pudelko and Li Wanshu demonstrate the infinite degrees of ingenuity and high levels of craft skill that the medium demands. Wanshu, from China, uses UV reactive nylon wire, UV light and fluorescent paint to painstakingly construct wearable sculpture that references the rich ecology of marine life, such as jellyfish and anemones.

In this show the under-represented artists’ book tends to be a quieter, more understated affair. Despite its quietness and delicacy, the medium can be impactful, full of skill and imagination. Susie Wilson uses collagraph techniques, combined with sculpted and cut paper, to create small book forms which hint at time and cellular processes. Using the medium of paper elsewhere, Deborah Boyd Whyte’s, sculpture Chiselled Paper Blocks spans several art forms. The work, which has deep cuts, scores and tears embedded in layered paper, suggests some of the historical violence that books have attracted.

Bushe, who won the W. Gordon Smith painting prize, has returned to his roots as an illustrator of comic books to create a “live” pen drawing that unfolds imaginatively across scores of paper pages.

The Cordis prize is awarded for the best example of tapestry and weaving. Louise Martin’s Ploughed, Linda Green’s Reluctant Revolutions and Rachel Johnston’s River Shoes will certainly make the judges’ choice a difficult one. The final result will be announced this evening.

If there are flaws in the curatorial process they manifest themselves in the under-representation of certain media (glass is noticeable by its absence), the inclusion of work by artists who have been seen in the Society of Scottish Artists show, which immediately preceded this in the same venue, and the unmistakable feeling that some work has been chosen not on intrinsic merit but by how it might “sit” comfortably in relation to others. Despite these shortcomings it is good to see that the fine and applied arts, as represented here, are thriving and evolving.

Exhibition runs until Dec 27