Landscape and a sense of humour mark the works of Rowan Paton and Alan Grieve For these are our mountains

IT’S a bit of a funny one, isn’t it?” says Rowan Paton when discussing the fact that she met Alan Grieve, the artist with whom she is exhibiting at Tent Gallery in Edinburgh this week, on Instagram. “There’s so much nonsense and rubbish you have to sift through, then these wonderful gems.”

But Paton instantly recognised that Grieve’s work, which shared her own interest in landscape and humour, was a “gem”.

But the odd thing was, she says, she suddenly realised she already knew him. “He was in the year below me at Edinburgh College of Art!” Real-world meetings ensued, their artistic connection cemented. “And then this Tent Gallery opening came up and we decided to go for it.”

“We both collect images,” says Paton, choked up with the flu (“Terrible timing”) two days before she is due to install their exhibition, Lost All Reason and Direction, in the small white space that is the university’s exhibition space for former graduates and international artists.

“Alan documents his surroundings very efficiently.” Paton delights in Grieve’s humour, which is never afraid to take a smutty turn, which comes out in his annotated sketches and diagrams.

Her own process of collecting images and words is very different, she says. “I’m not documenting. I’m trying to create a little escape pod for myself.”

Some ten years ago, after graduating from Edinburgh and securing a two-year master’s at Yale, Paton returned home to find herself “emotional tumbleweed”.

“I was in an oppressive rut where I couldn’t make work.” Some years later, she realised it was depression, “I started taking the pills and it was amazing. I realised, ‘Yes! You can cope’.”

When her baby was born five years ago, it gave her another catalyst – as babies tend to do – to start making work every available day that she could.

Paton’s brightly coloured paintings are mountains, at heart, she says, for she has always been fascinated by their presence since holidaying with her grandparents on Arran as a child.

“It really stuck in my psyche.” Much of her work begins with found images or her own mountain photos, deconstructed until almost

unrecognisable, then embellished brightly with paint, with life, with daubs of humour.

Grieve’s “mountain” is the Hill of Beath, the landmark at the end of his road in Dunfermline. The artist, whose work for Lost All Reason and Direction is a documenting of sorts of his walk from his house to the top of the hill, “a bit like psychogeography, but more mundane,” he jokes, from drug dealers leaving their stash in the rabbit warrens on the hill to snippets of overheard conversation and local myth.

He’s in the job for it, he tells me. By day Grieve is a hairdresser in Workspace, a salon he set up eight years ago with his friend Emma Thomson, in Wellwood, just outside Dunfermline, “the classic vacuum where nothing is really going on,” he says cheerfully. He mingles art and haircutting, village life and artistic creation. “I set up the salon with Emma. We made all the fittings portable, even the sinks, so we could clear it all away to use for art exhibitions at night.”

Grieve’s work is a dynamic part of village life – his clients sometimes come along to help with setting up exhibitions.

“And another good thing about being a hairdresser is the stories!” he says. It led to his first project for the National Theatre of Scotland a few years ago, in which he gave people free haircuts in return for a story and a piece of music.

“I just take all my inspiration from Dunfermline, what’s around me,” he

welcoming people. And it might be a bit of a squeeze. There’s a packed-out 50-seater bus coming from Dunfermline, full of “locals and customers,” says Grieve. “All in all, it’s quite satisfying.”

Rowan Paton and Alan Grieve, Lost All Reason and Direction, Tent Gallery, Ground Floor, Evolution House, 78 West Port, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, 0131 650 1000, www.ed.ac.uk, until Jan 26, daily, 10am-4pm