Charles Avery has been working on this exhibition for about ten years. Well, not exactly this exhibition, but the epic project from which it emerges. Frustrated by the process of art-making, flitting from piece to piece, Avery decided to invent a place, the Island, and throw himself into investigating its culture and society — one with a very cerebral basis. The Island’s national sport isn’t football, it’s competitive philosophising.
Avery’s work takes the form of evidence brought back from the Island: large-scale drawings, “specimens” (sculptures) and publications. After a decade of imagining, building up the structures inherent to his fictional world, Avery is turning to the material texture of the Island. This exhibition establishes something akin to “Island style”, a vocabulary of everyday objects — such as wallpaper, tables, drinking vessels, headgear — that show you what life might be like there.
At first glance, it seems not that different to here, but the deeper you delve, the stranger Avery’s world becomes, while remaining doggedly familiar. Ordinary people hang about wearing extraordinary hats (they denote their favoured branch of philosophy). They wear leggings and slot their children into the same pushchair I had as a child; they carry bags bearing the legend “Bargain Village” but they’re followed around by earless dogs. Their furniture, here represented by a three-sided table, is based on odd geometry. Apparently they feel that a square table gives you awkward confrontations, too direct or too indirect. A three-sided table is much more inclusive. It makes perfect sense, somehow.
And that’s key to the success of Avery’s work. It’s bizarre, but it works. It’s also extremely engaging; though full of learned allusions, it doesn’t matter a damn if you don’t notice. His drawings — which are superb; Avery is a superlative draughtsman — contain immense humour. One figure carries a bag emblazoned with the slogan “Looks like a Unicorn Smells like a Unicorn . . .” above a picture of a rhinoceros (you can buy this bag from the Edinburgh Art Festival, for £15). Avery’s work is unique and impossible to categorise but, when it’s this much fun, who cares?
Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The exhibition continues to Oct 3