Shapes and Things @ Sierra Metro

Set in a disused testing facility in far off Granton, Edinburgh, Sierra Metro is a not-for-profit, committee-run gallery of growing renown. It offers its generous space to emerging artists to facilitate experimentation and develop ambitious, large-scale works.

As part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival the gallery has invited two London based artists to exhibit new work under the title Shapes and Things. Here the artists, Gemma Holt and Richard Healy, will continue their ongoing dialogue about the language of design and its ancillary systems and codes, each showing new, independent work.

Taking as a starting point a chapter from the art historian E H Gombrich’s book The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Holt and Healy will explore the methods inherent in their practices and will include installation, drawings and textile prints.

Gemma Holt’s practice spans both fine art and design, often manipulating mass produced objects, such as Bic biros, in a way that investigates our current state of modernity and the ubiquity of design products in our day to day lives. She has even designed her own brand of paper in opposition to the universal A4 and named it G5, playing with our notions of the everyday.

Richard Healy’s work explores modernist design and architecture, often simplified and condensed into basic, graphic forms. Using drawing, printmaking and video installation, Healy’s wide reaching practice references design history and the ever prevailing link between design and technology.

Shapes and Things promises to be both playful and probing in equal measure. Anticipate cool minimalism with a touch flippancy and humour. Expect to have the way you see the things drastically changed. [Jonathan Williams]