An inspired combination where land meets the sea

There’s something special about the Tatha Gallery which makes it an inspiring venue for showing art and craft. The views up and down the River Tay and across to the mountains and farmland beyond generate a constant interplay of light and land, while the movement of shadows and reflections in the interior space makes for an uplifting experience.

All three artists here — despite working in different media — are motivated by similar subject matter, and two of them make work which relates to the immediate locale. Alex Malcolmson, who is originally from Shetland, makes work that is intimately bound up with the sea, including the Tay estuary.

Birds, nautical charts, fishing lures and objets trouvés all make an appearance in his box constructions, in which he acknowledges a lineage stretching back to the great American surrealist, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). To that list can be added, nearer to home, Will Maclean and Fred Stiven, as well as Ben Nicholson. Malcolmson’s most convincing work — a composition on white, full of geometry, shadow, surface and subtle tonality — is clearly part homage to the great English modernist.

Originally from Glasgow, Jane Keith lives in Fife and teaches in Dundee, where she graduated in printed textiles in 1995. Her work in wool, cashmere and other natural fabrics uses a variety of techniques, including silkscreen printing and hand painting, and employs subtle geometries and patterning, derived from the various agricultural practices in the fields and hillsides around her home. The results are technically accomplished and aesthetically rewarding — her scarves, ties and wall-hangings all demonstrate the versatility of this accomplished maker.

Angie Lewin, now based in Scotland, is a wood engraver, painter and screen printer. She is recognised both as a book illustrator and an artist. She illustrated a collection of garden writing, Garden Wisdom published in 2009, and in the following year, another publication, Plants and Places, was dedicated to her own work. Her stylised botanically-based imagery is decoratively joyful, and easy on the eye.

Combined, these artists show how traditional media and imagery still have an important, popular part to play in our artistic culture.

Until September 28