CRITIC’S CHOICE

Just a few weeks until Collective Gallery draws back the curtain on its much anticipated refurbishment of the William Playfair City Observatory complex on Calton Hill. Decades of dereliction will soon be a distant memory.

But you can sneak your head over the stone parapet in some small way, now, for alongside the two new exhibitions that will open at the end of this month is Collective Matter, a collaboration with design curators Panel, an artist-oriented take on a gallery souvenir shop. “Contradicting the common structures of mass production and consumption usually associated with the gallery or museum shop,” they say, it will be wildly different from what you’ll find in the tourist shops blaring out bagpipe reels on the Royal Mile below – wildly more expensive too, although it will also contain souvenir pencils and the like.

At the core is the fact Collective knows that many of the people mounting this hill will be here not just to see the art, not even, perhaps, but to see the buildings, to take in the history and the place. There are “postcards” here, the hill’s monuments reimagined by photographer Alan Dimmick, pegged on to the whisper-thin constructs of Danish mobile experts Flensted in a collaboration that reveals the grit behind the architecture. Ceramicist Katy West reflects the secret “trades”

history of the hill with kitchen storage jars called Fair Play, while Rachel Adams has created a silver sextant and enamel constellations necklace. Mick Peter’s scarf, pictured, draws attention to women in astronomy, while Katie Schwab provides the practical, a rain poncho as colour-blocked circular marvel of waxed cotton that doubles up as a picnic blanket, inspired by the dyers’ cloths hung out to dry on the hill a century ago.

Collective Matter, Collective Gallery, City Observatory, 38 Calton Hill, 0131 556 1264, shop.collective-edinburgh.art, opens daily Nov 24 (pre-order online), 10am-4pm