CRITIC’S CHOICE

BRINGING a Hebridean view to the centre of Edinburgh this week, this Dundas Gallery group show of five contemporary artists from North Uist shows the draw of the island to an increasing population of artists, writers and musicians.

These five artists are all inspired by the natural surroundings on North Uist, the stuff of a land grown on 300 billion year old rock. Fergus Granville makes sculptures out of things washed up by the sea – and then put back in there, tethered underwater, for a year or so. There are plastic mannequins sporting mermaids purse wigs, each object altered, added to. Sheenagh Patience,. above, paints the landscapes of Berneray, walking the local beach, picking up and painting pieces of fragmented pottery and shells.

Marnie Kelty also mines the beach for materials, although these she grinds down in to pigments and inks for her wall paintings. She works, too, in photography, interested in the void spaces, the migration of things and people, the transformation of flotsam by a new environment. Fiona Pearson works in oil and watercolour, painting in semiabstract fashion, the white sand beaches near her home on North Uist, or working up drawings of cup-marked rocks, interested in the interaction between rock and water. And then Catherine Yeatman, whose abstract landscapes and finely drafted birds aim to capture the essence of place and time.

Edge hebrides, Dundas Street Gallery, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, www. dundas-street-gallery.co.uk Until 9 Oct, Daily 11am–5pm