For ten years, Ingleby Gallery was housed in a Georgian townhouse on an out of the way terrace in the New Town, a place that lent the space a rather proper air, undercut by ambitious, almost eccentric projects, like the breakneck programme of twenty-six shows that marked the gallery’s an­n­iver­sary year.

Now, Ingleby, in a move more ambitious still, has shifted to a new location on Calton Road. It’s a huge, three-storey affair, with a room given over to prints and editions, a small street-level gallery, and a genuinely breath-taking ex­hib­i­tion space on the first floor.

This huge room comes close to over­whelm­ing the work of Kay Rosen, an American artist who makes quiet, subtle work that explores the use of words as images, deftly altering meaning with the ap­plic­a­tion of colour. Memory of Red is a large wall drawing in a sturdy sans-serif typeface, that reads ‘Re­mem­ber­ed’, the word divided, with that final ‘red’ picked out in pink, and the clipped ‘remembe’ in red. This simple tactic has a strange effect, what you might call a lin­guist­ic illusion, sending the reading mind and seeing eye into a bit of a tizzy. In another large piece, Rosen offers her version of seascape painting, with the words ‘sky’, ‘fog’ and ‘sea’ layered over each other in grey on a grey back­ground. Her prints offer sight gags and puns: the word ‘yellow’ in yellow is split in half to form a ‘yell’ and an ‘ow’, the first word de­scrib­ing the second. Greyer G invents a pal­in­drome, with the letters fading from dark at the edges to light at the centre.

There’s humour to be found down­s­tairs, too. Edinburgh-born Susan Collis makes work that im­me­di­ately calls to mind the old gag about the critic who lavishes attention on the gallery fire ex­t­in­guish­er­ instead of the sculpture beside it. This is because Collis cel­e­b­rates the most mundane objects, rendering the contents of hardware store draws in precious metals and gems. Riffing on the freshly refitted status of the space she is showing in, Collis has inlaid mother of pearl into the gallery floor to form a shim­mer­ing monument in miniature to spilt paint. Fixed is a wall-spanning in­stal­l­a­tion that, from afar, looks like un­fin­ished pre­par­a­tions to hang a show of paintings. Up close, the rawl plugs are made of ir­ri­des­cent coral, and the tiny screws have been fashioned from 18 carat white gold and inset with diamonds. A broom in the corner looks ready for the tip, but the splatters on its handle and the paint that clogs its bristles are crafted from a list of materials that reads beau­ti­fully, from citron cyr­so­prase to white howite.

Outside, there’s the first in­stall­ment of a year-long public art project dubbed Billboard for Edinburgh. Mark Wallinger is the first of four artists to occupy the space with a stark text reading “Mark Wallinger Is Innocent”, of what crime I’m not quite sure. One thing is certain, though: Ingleby Gallery has made a fine start in its new home.

Kay Rosen and Susan Collis are at Ingleby Gallery until 24 September.

This review was or­i­gin­ally published in The Herald.