A Tribute to Edwin Morgan

A POEM is often a small thing, but big in ambition, layers of meaning and colour overlaid in a comparatively small space. The same might be said of this modestly sized installation by Steven Campbell and Rob O’Donnell, in recognition of Edwin Morgan, at 81 arguably Scotland’s greatest living poet.

This is not, in the strictest sense, a collaboration. It is, rather, two artists working separately on the same subject, their work carefully arranged in the same space. However, in the response of one artist to another there is always room for a variety of approaches.

O’Donnell’s photographs and photomontages capture articles from the poet’s home: his faithful grey Adler typewriter, his bookshelves - from Picasso to The Times Atlas of the Moon, videos from Gay Classics to The Empire Strikes Back. Others catch the poet appearing, as if by carefully planned accident, in illustrations for his own poems, like a director taking a cameo in his own movie, while some probe the business of the writer’s craft: juggling creativity and a fickle muse, rattling the bars of society’s cage.

Campbell’s colourful mural-like paintings and beautifully made plaster reliefs are perhaps a more instinctive response to Morgan and his work. Each painting, surrounded by a patchwork of smaller paintings and sketches, combines articles from Morgan’s home with a portrait of the man himself, and images from the fertile territory of the imagination.

Any tribute to a poet as skilful, prolific and daring as Morgan needs to be multi-dimensional, full of colour and with a touch of humour thrown in. This is all of these.

It is not a portrait, it is a more personal, perhaps more stimulating, representation of some aspects of the man and his work. Like one of his poems, you could sit in front of it for hours and still notice fresh insights.

Until 3 February