A visit to the Fruitmarket Gallery is worth making for the cafe alone, I was told. Award-winning coffee and irresistable home-made cakes. A great little bookshop too, specialising in hard-to-find art books and small-press books and zines. The Gallery's position nicely complements the City Art Centre, which is directly across the road in Market Street.
The current exhibition, running until 12th April, is by Scottish installation artist Claire Barclay. The piece in the photograph, which is called Subject to Habit, is fairly typical of her preoccupations. It mixes ready-made objects with specially designed, machine-made objects that seem oddly familiar but which defy absolute categorisation. For instance, the black gym mats in this piece trigger an association which determines how we read the other objects, which in turn are clearly not the objects our conditioned responses would lead us to think they should be. All the work in the show plays on the ambiguity of forms, carrying contradictory connotations such as malevolence and benevolence in an uneasy balance.
An informative video interview with the artist was looping in an upstairs room and the show was supported by a series of talks and a seminar. Edinburgh is indeed a lucky town.
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