BACK IN 2004, when Hayley Tompkins was nominated for the Beck's Futures Prize, London's ICA gallery did her what might have been a disservice. They put her – like the proverbial mad woman – in the attic. I remember clearly how she turned this curator
ial vice into a virtue. In this rather ragged and domestic space with its raked ceiling and grubby walls, her installation of tiny watercolours and gouaches were arranged in odd places just below eye height or high in corners.
It became a solitary and distinct breathing space in a show that was a bit of a ragbag. I have a favourite memory from the opening night of the rather tall Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant stooping low to look at work as though in a scene from Alice In Wonderland.
The lesson, I think, is that for all its apparent modesty, Tompkins' work shouldn't be underestimated. The artist makes paintings that have been as small as a thumbnail and are frequently no bigger than a large hand. I've seen them in low-key artist-led spaces and I've seen them on the walls of the slickest commercial gallery in the world, Gagosian on Madison Avenue in New York.
Tompkins, who is 38 this year and who studied at Glasgow School of Art, is one of the more innovative in a wave of artists, many of them female, who subverted the rules of the contemporary art game in the past 10 years. Where some sought sensation, she sought spontaneity, and where some art was all brawn, she concentrated on more modest sensations such as the fleeting glance. Where some sought permanence, she looked at the ephemeral.
Her work is distinctly lo-fi: a ripped picture from a magazine, say, or a thickly painted splinter of wood, a delicate abstract watercolour made on ordinary office paper. Another painter once described to me the appeal of her work: it is the shortness of the distance between Tompkins' head and her hand.
Autobuilding is Tompkins' largest show on home turf to date. Rather than some rooftop eyrie she has been given the run of two storeys and seven rooms in the 18th-century splendour of Edinburgh's Inverleith House. The show is not a retrospective, although it does contain elements of a recent exhibition at London's Drawing Room.
There is, I think, a risk of over-extension in all of this. Two new table-mounted installations of cut photographs and paper works feel a bit rushed. The luxury of all that space can mean there are gaps and hiatuses in the rhythm of the show.
But when Tompkins is good, she is really, really good. In keeping with the natural setting she has crafted some wall-mounted sculptures out of twigs. They are pinned together, painted in gouache in silvers and blues, and crusted with glistening squares that turn out to be chopped-up photographs. Entitled Metabuilt and Artificiel, they are a lovely evocation of the mixed messages we receive in our environment, the natural and the manmade, the 'real' and the merely optical.
Alongside these works she has been experimenting with clay, making relief patterns. Ty-pe is a tiny loop of painted clay in violet and green, like a fossilised ribbon. Many of Tompkins' larger new works – assemblages of wooden trays and painted objects – are oddly delicate but decidedly unpretty. They have weird metallic colours: bronze, dull gold and grubby silver.
This is the palette of our computer keyboards, our mobile phones, all that plastic pretending to be metal that we surround ourselves with. This becomes more than hinted at in a series of works in which phones themselves feature. There is a keyboard embedded in clay. The work Tele consists of two phone 'carcasses' cased in thick pink paint.
Tompkins' first foray into film, Interstice, is characteristically impressionistic. Filmed using her camera phone, it is an essay in transforming the everyday into a bit of poetic mystery. Traffic hums. Buses come and go. You follow her point of view up steps and into a dark room where the light resolves itself. Then you're in the sitting room of a flat where the light through curtains turns the scene golden as though cast in amber. For Tompkins the camera seems an easy extension of her hand or eye.
The strongest room in the show is the final one. It's hard to put the individual elements into print without sounding derisory. There are three wall assemblages. Each, named Salute, is a strip of wood, with strange protuberances tacked on that turn out to be orange peel. These are painted red, silver and blue.
Supra is a fancy wood and glass museum cabinet whose contents positively sing with freshness. There is a picture from a magazine of the magnificent red-haired actress Julianne Moore, some bottles which have been rolled in glue and sand. There's a giant clay spoon whose zingy colour of azure blue sears your vision. The objects remind you of ancient Greek vases before they have been scrubbed up into pristine museum specimens or the beautifully unresolved paint and plaster sculptures of the American artist Cy Twombly.
I can't explain why all this feels so good to the eye. But, believe me, it does.
• Until April 19,
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