Scotland And Venice 2007 is a rather bland title for this, the home­com­ing show of the six artists chosen to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale, hiding the fact that it’s a tightly-curated group show that links fantastic and oblique looks at the world with me­t­ic­u­lous processes.

The show opens with Lucy Skaer’s The Big Wave, a three-panel reworking in pencil and marker pen of Hokusai’s The Great Wave that distorts the original’s scale (Skaer’s big version is huge compared to Hokusai’s great work) and ob­l­it­er­ates detail, the finicky curls of the source painting rendered in repeated sworls trapped inside grids of varying sizes. Using the same method, Leonora depicts a partial whale skeleton, this time taken from a small pho­to­graph - again, Skaer is playing with scale, con­ver­t­ing miniature de­pic­tions to a size closer to the truth. Between the drawings, there’s an oak table which Skaer has inlaid with mother-of-pearl, set out in in­dis­t­inct, blobby shapes. There’s nothing final about Skaer’s work: the large drawings are literally un­fin­ished, edged with grids waiting to be filled, but more than that, this is an artist who takes points from the past, already recorded - Hisoku’s painting, the found table - and in­ter­ve­nes, dragging them into her present.

Rosalind Nashashibi shares Skaer’s in­vest­ig­at­ive outlook, but her focus is on social groups, the rituals that bind them and contexts which define them. In a new film work, Bachelor Machines Part 1, the crew of an Italian cargo ship are under study. Long, lingering shots of the vessel, in contrast with the brief bursts of human action, hint that Nashashibi means to cast this ship as her prot­ag­on­ist, showing that the men on board are commanded by their ocean-going home as much as they are by their captain. No real con­clu­sions are drawn, though, with Nashashibi pre­fer­ring to hint. This strategy works well on film, but the diptychs and triptychs of pho­to­graphs shown alongside Bachelor Machines suffer for it. Gumbi, Passolini, Cic­ci­o­lina matches an African secret society with Passolini’s Oedipus Rex and a news clipping about La Cic­ci­o­lina, ex-wife of artist Jeff Koons, one-time porn actress and pol­it­i­ci­an. Intended as ‘visual poems’, I suspect that Nashashibi herself is the only person who can read them.

Charles Avery presents work from his Islanders series, about a fictional land with its own in­di­gen­ous people, the If’en, and a complex mythology, including a vast array of gods. The August Snakes have long beards, like Chinese villains in silent films, while another god, Dha is shaped like the number two, shown in a drawing providing support for smooching lovers, and again in mo­nu­ment­al form. Avery’s drawings of his islanders are glorious, matching wild ima­gin­a­tion with im­pec­c­able draught­s­man­ship, showing the If’en philo­soph­ising in their local pub and at a crowded mar­ket­place, where they hawk pickled eggs and por­no­graphy. It might sound a bit silly on paper, but there’s something about Avery’s apparent, though probably feigned, con­vic­tion that makes it easy to take this invented world very seriously.

Henry Coombes shares Avery’s humour, present­ing a series of rather charming small paintings and collage works that, on closer in­spec­tion, are dis­t­inc­tly dis­tur­b­ing med­it­a­tions on sexuality and class politics, full of im­pos­s­ible creatures and drawing heavily on the work of Landseer. The cen­trepie­ce of his in­stal­l­a­tion is a truly re­mark­able short film, in which a sub­mis­s­ive human-stag hybrid is gutted by a game­keep­er­, its entrails exposed to feed an eagle.

Tony Swain is another maker of worlds. Working on newspaper, Swain allows his medium to suggest images, which he sup­ple­ments with more collaged clippings. The results are im­pos­s­ibly dense, and rebuff any attempts to make sense of them, and this makes them hugely appealing, as the eye is led on a wild chase around each web of images. You can see where Swain is coming from, even if it’s hard to say where he ends up. This is work that takes on Dada and Sur­real­ism, and un­der­takes an ambiguous inquiry of Modernist practice, which would be an awfully dry business if Swain’s un­fet­ter­ed approach didn’t reap such rich results, com­pel­ling and con­foun­d­ing in equal measure.

In amongst all this, Louise Hopkins’ work is something of a let down. Hopkins, like Swain or Skaer, makes work that rests on extant materials, painting on patterned fabric and maps. Hopkins rarely strays too far from her sources, though, ending up with patterned fabric with its pattern painted on top, or dis­t­inc­tly mappish map works, and there is not enough in the process to make up for this empty pret­t­i­ness.

Hopkins does, though, fit in neatly with her peers, in what is a sur­pris­ingly neat show. Curator Philip Long has gathered together six very different artists linked both by strong themes - the re­cur­rance of imagined worlds, or attempts to make sense of the one we have - and artistic tactics, in par­t­ic­u­lar the use and reuse of extant material, from the day’s paper to Japanese art. This is more than a survey of current practice in Scotland, then, it’s a true group show, one that sheds new light on the work of the selected artists.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 21st, 2007.