It’s the quiet ones you have to watch. At Lowsalt, there are no big names, no bells and whistles, no over­ween­ing cur­at­or­i­al guidance, just a set of works that quietly assert them­selves, and quietly assert the con­nec­tions that bind them together.

That said, the first thing you see when you step through the door is a bloody great big black wing propped up in a corner, casting out a sickly red glow. The piece, by Douglas Morland, is, despite its size and the looming angle at which it sits, far from mo­nu­ment­al. Instead, it is an absence with presence, its surface such a deep, matte black that at first glance it looks to have been cut into the wall behind it - a solid shadow that casts, im­pos­s­ibly, its own shadow made of light. The source of this unnerving thing is a drawing by a patient of psy­cho­an­a­lyst Marie Louise Von Franz, who depicted herself in a dream landscape, under the shadow of the ‘wing of Satan’. Morland matches this paranoid imagining made flesh with two drawings of branks, or scold’s bridles, the metal masks used to punish trouble­some women of the 17th and 18th centuries by trapping their tongues in a spiked metal vice. One of the pair is mirrored along a central line, so that the spikes and chains of the brank become a Rorschach inkblot test with only one possible, horrible in­ter­pret­a­tion.

After that, Steven Anderson’s twinned works come as something of a relief.

On a knotted nylon mat of the sort designed to cost as little, and last as long, as possible, Anderson has placed snapped guitar strings, shattered drum­st­icks and broken plectrums, gleaned from a Glasgow rehearsal room. The items are arranged, too, not simply scattered, as if Anderson has taken on the role of an an­thro­po­lo­gic­al ar­chae­o­lo­gist of the present, digging through layers of con­tem­por­ary detritus in a bid to un­der­stand and il­lu­min­ate the cultural practices that surround him. On the wall above the mat, Anderson continues his studies from another angle, present­ing a contact sheet full of impromptu portraits taken at an unnamed gig as they subjects walked through the doors of the venue. Somewhere between these two pieces a band is playing, but Anderson is more in­ter­es­ted in the relics of rehearsal and the an­t­i­cip­a­tion on the faces of an audience, putting col­lect­ive ex­per­i­ence on the stage, side­lin­ing per­for­m­ance in favour of the bonds between creators, and between consumers.

Potential and past actions rise up again in the work of Javier Ferro. An untitled in­stal­l­a­tion takes the form of a crudely cast concrete table, on top of which sits an un­fin­ished letter in a shaky hand. It reads, ‘Dearest, I have to think about you ever­y­where I am. I am therefore writing to you from my boss’ office whom I’m re­p­res­ent­ing at the moment’. On the floor, crumpled sheets are scattered about, sug­gest­ing that this in­ar­t­ic­u­late missive with its eccentric emphases has been slaved over and endlessly revised, only to fail. The piece is matched with two works on paper, one bearing crudely torn, cut and drawn circles - another quest for per­fec­tion doomed to failure from the start.

These are three very different artists, then, with different aims and methods. But the three are drawn together in this space by a shared sen­s­ib­il­ity, a focus on potential futures and frag­men­ted memories - Morland’s borrowed dreams, Anderson’s shared ex­per­i­ences and Ferro’s dashed hopes are together greater than the sum of their parts. The works are also drawn together by this space. Lowsalt is housed in a rather dingy disused workshop, complete with a layered pal­im­psest of torn wall­pa­pers, a scuffed floor and broken signage - it is a place that wears its working past on its sleeve, and, thanks to its new purpose as a gallery, points to a future of further col­l­ab­or­a­tion.

The awkward but eloquent alliance of three artists, and the gallery itself, is furthered by the show’s unwieldy, hinting title - ‘Not a dis­en­tan­gle­ment from but a pro­gress­ive knotting into’ - and a brief, sug­gest­ive text by Ruth Barker, which is presented on a par with the artists’ work. Barker doesn’t stoop so low as to explain the work before us, pre­fer­ring to present a loose as­sem­blage of ideas. She tells visitors that, in ancient Greek, the words for ‘truth’ and ‘not for­get­t­ing’ are synonyms, wonders whether the col­lect­ive ima­gin­a­tion might contain shared images of neutrinos as well as those of mythical beasts, and muses on passive and active modes of re­mem­ber­ing.

Barker’s essay is a fitting coda to a show that finds its strength in ellipses and tangents, matching un­con­s­cious fears with ex­pres­sions of hope and the ties that bind a society together to form an unspoken, unseen bond between the ex­hib­it­ing artists.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 29th, 2007.