Nature Study @ Inverleith House

Inverleith's parents are renewing their vows. Miss Art and Master Science's house-on-the-hill love affair will be celebrated with an exhibition of John Hutton Balfour's botanical teaching diagrams, and new works on paper by Grandmère Sculpture, Louise Bourgeois. It will simply be entitled Nature Study. To make sense of the world through obsessive enquiry, the shared concern of both disciplinary partners, which has so far informed the in-house programming, will be here spread bare. The works of both Balfour and Bourgeois lay testament to this shared desire for edification. A dialogue as industrious in measure as it is illustrative, this pairing will ingeniously act as both a fruitful playground for the casual theorist, and a bold diagram of intent for the baffled art basher.

Before being made obsolete by slides in the 1950s, Balfour's drawings were used to didactic ends. Thankfully, obsolescence is currently a useful word in the art world. Re-presented in a contemporary context, these drawings take on a golden and structural quality. They intrigue because of their format, they please because they remind of us a time before glaring screens, and most significantly they offer resolve. Balfour drew because he wanted to pass on his botanical knowledge. It is no secret that people often fall short of finding such satisfactions in the field of art. However, Bourgeois' new works on paper appear to be her most transparent to date. Lines of red and blue depict couples, mothers and female forms: a lifetime of obsessive study distilled to a few symbolic streaks on the page. Now, there's no doubt that this exhibition will invite theoretical deliberations of concepts of the illustrative, as manipulated by Balfour, and the workings of the contingent, embodied and inarticulate evident in the work of Bourgeois. As fun as these will be, in the face of such immediate works, it is perhaps most fitting to highlight instead the intrinsic. If ever there were drawings that could shout 'I've spent my life studying the world through my art, and this is what I've found', these are they. With these drawings and the help of Balfour's weighty scientific stamp, Bourgeois perfectly elucidates her exploratory practice: a massive and timely endorsement of art. [Nancy Katz]