Jamie Shovlin is as much an archivist as he is an artist. The show that brought his work to wide­s­pread attention was an exhibit of drawings by a teenager, Naomi V. Jelish, presented alongside mementoes and newspaper cuttings detailing the mys­ter­i­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of the girl and her family. The work that earned him a nom­in­a­tion for the Beck’s Futures award was a eulogy to the cult post-punk German group Lust/Faust, gathering fan letters, ad­ver­t­ise­ments and excerpts of un­re­leased songs.

The fact that both Jelish and Lust/Faust are figments of Shovlin’s ima­gin­a­tion has earned him a re­pu­ta­tion as a hoaxer, but his me­t­ic­u­lously crafted invented histories are not simply elaborate gags, they are med­it­a­tions on objective and sub­ject­ive truth, subtly in­vest­ig­at­ing the way in which the col­lec­tion, present­a­tion and cat­egor­isa­tion of in­form­a­tion impacts on its status.

Aggregate, as the title hints, sees Shovlin turning his archivist’s eye on himself, gathering four in­de­pend­ent but deeply linked sets of work together.

The first of the four, Origin of Species, consists of multiple copies of Darwin’s great work. Two museum-like vitrines dominate the dimly-lit lower gallery of the Talbot Rice in a temporal echo of sorts: when Darwin abandoned his medical studies at the Un­i­ver­s­ity of Edinburgh, he turned to this room, then part of the in­sti­tu­tion’s Natural History Museum. In the first vitrine, four copies of On The Origin Of Species lie open, each annotated by past readers, one bearing a solicitor’s com­pli­ments slip as a bookmark. In the next, more editions of the book are laid out, ranging from battered 1970s pa­per­backs to dusty tomes from the turn of the last century. On the walls around the two cabinets, Shovlin has mounted pages from the books, each brutally edited, so that all that remains are passages readers have un­der­lined, high­lighted or annotated, the rest redacted with a black marker. This new version of On The Origin Of Species is written by readers. Some are skeptical - a note reads ‘evidence of the creator??’ - others approach the text with a narrow focus, un­der­lin­ing the names of par­t­ic­u­lar organisms. In the simple act of hiding words, Shovlin reveals a set of questions about the nature of his chosen text, any text, and the space between facts and their in­ter­pret­a­tion.

The Birds In Her Garden is the first of two works inspired by Shovlin’s mother, who, we are told, spent much of her free time com­p­let­ing jigsaws while observing the natural aviary outside her window. This is another museo­lo­gic­al display, with a stuffed bird in its case, a bookshelf, and multiple or­n­i­tho­lo­gic­al drawings ringed with cuttings from bird-watching guides and hand­writ­ten notes. The drawings carry rather un­s­ci­en­ti­f­ic captions - here is Mr. Blackie The Blackbird, there is Evil Bastard The Magpie - but the cuttings are me­t­ic­u­lously ordered, each cross-re­f­er­enced with its source text on the shelf, which are in turn ordered, not by subject, author or date, but, ar­bit­rar­ily, by size. Where Origin of Species is a dry look at the sub­ject­ive in­ter­pret­a­tion of fact by laymen, The Birds In Her Garden cheekily elevates amateur botany to the status of Darwin’s in­vest­ig­a­tions and again un­der­lines the value of personal tax­o­nom­ies.

Upstairs, after slides and video from Mrs. Shovlin’s back garden, comes a trio of works dubbed In Search Of Perfect Harmony. First, a dazz­lingly complex diagram, which explains the concept of com­pli­ment­ary colours, matching 12 wax crayons into four coloured tetrads which each cor­res­pond to elements of the next work, three batches of rubbings taken from jigsaws. The perfect harmony in question is a uniform grey that, in theory, should result in the com­bin­a­tions of colour used to make each jigsaw frottage. This is an ob­ses­sion­al, failed attempt to bring order to the chaos of an un­fin­ished jigsaw, and, frankly, a jaw-drop­pingly pointless exercise, applying the rigours of the sci­en­ti­f­ic method to an absurd ex­per­i­ment. Then, in a small pho­to­graph­ic portrait, we see what at first appears to be Shovlin’s moving tribute to his mother, the woman who, through her twin hobbies, inspired his love of cat­egor­isa­tion and ordering.

But - hang on a minute - this is Jamie Shovlin, arch fibber, and teller of exquisite lies. Is this woman the artist’s mother, or no more real than his an­a­gram­mat­ic avatar, Naomi V. Jelish, and Lust/Faust, the band so hip they never existed? This is the question around which Aggregate revolves, and ul­ti­m­ately, Shovlin’s point seems to be that the answer is as ir­re­l­ev­ant or relevant as Darwin’s readers’ reduction of the text before them to a series of sub­ject­ively chosen gobbets. Facts are judged not by their truth or falsity, but by the way in which they are presented, and the manner in which they are cat­egor­ised.

After this, Landrangers forms a fitting coda. The work is col­lec­tion of maps, each with a detailed catalogue card, ac­com­pan­ied by a map of maps, dividing the British Isles into the arbitrary squares chosen by car­to­graph­ers. It is a simple re­p­res­ent­a­tion of a set of cat­egor­ies, but one that elicits a personal response, to the euphony of place names and the memories they inspire. On my visit, a retired couple stood before the Landrangers on the wall, and, like Darwin’s readers and Shovlin’s mother, reordered the col­lec­tion, according to past holidays and country walks.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 2nd, 2007.