CRITIC’S CHOICE

COLLECTIVE, high up on top of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, has reopened this week, the old Playfair observatory the home to two very different gallery spaces as well as outdoor grounds with breathtaking views.

Opening in the large City Dome space, which used to house a suitably large telescope (there are still some inside the main building), is

Christian Newby’s FlowerNecklace-Cargo-Net (pictured) a large scale tapestry draped from the ceiling and an accompanying newspaper, made by the artist.

Newby, an experimental textile artist, graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2009, and is now based in London. This is his largest comission to date, the tapestry itself nine metres wide, an architectural intervention to divide this wonderful circular space.

Newby has created the whole with a hand-held tufting gun, an instrument normally used in industrial processes to make carpets.

Newby here uses it to create his colourful imagery, flowers alluding to traditional tapestry motifs, surrounded by a net motif that alludes, Newby says, to the experience of the lockdown from which we have all just emerged.

Accompanying the tapestry is a newspaper, produced by the artist, containing texts on the process, on the maintenance of the tufting gun, on the decision-making and mark making of the process, alongside an essay by Andrew Bourne.

In the Hillside exhibition space, you can catch Holly McLean’s film, “If you get the knees right the rest should follow.”

As ever, for those who make it to the top of this remarkable hill, the Collective kiosk is open for coffee and cake.

Christian Newby: Boredom>Mischief> Fantasy>Radicalism>Fantasy, Collective, City Observatory, 38

Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 0131 556 1264, collective-edinburgh.art Until 29 Aug, Thurs-Sun, 10am-4pm