Art reviews: Thomas Abercromby | Hayley Tompkins | Jesse Wine | Osama Al Rayyan

Hayley Tompkins: surroundings, Modern Institute, Osbourne Street ★★★

Jesse Wine: Time’s Arrow, Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane ★★★★

Osama Al Rayyan: Camping, Modern Institute, Bricks Space ★★★★

Mount Stuart’s role in Scottish contemporary art continues to grow with the announcement that the team will curate the Scotland + Venice exhibition for 2026 by artist duo Bugarin and Castle. Meantime, the neo-gothic mansion on Bute is now presenting two contemporary art shows every summer. For one of these, an artist is invited to make work in response to any aspect of the house, its gardens, history or collection; for the other, an artist is invited primarily to work with local communities. Thomas Abercromby has spent several months with We Are With You, a local support group, and his work, currently installed in the house, draws on that experience as well as on his research into the history of the gardens.

Abercromby reimagines Bute as the semi-fictional Recovery Island, a supportive community built around gardens and gardening where those suffering from hardship, trauma or addiction can rebuild their lives.

Abercrombie has written five audio works - perhaps a five-part audio drama - each focused on a person who needs to recover from loss, addiction, mental ill health, a toxic relationship. Each character is named after a flower, and together they form a community which is accepting, nurturing, affirming and non-judgmental.

Gardening is both restorative practice and metaphor for growth and care, with specific references woven in about the history of the gardens at Mount Stuart. Mention is made of the “old world” across the water where care is a lottery, hidebound by red-tape, and often experienced more as punishment than healing.

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The five tracks are playing in five spaces in Mount Stuart, the Chapel, Marble Staircase, two of the bedrooms and the indoor swimming pool in the basement (in this last one, the space is viewed through a window). Abercromby has worked with scent designer Clara Weale to create a scent for each room, from pine needles and freshly turned soil to lavender and birch smoke.

Each story takes time to unfold through poetic descriptions, conversation and original music. Listening is a soothing, unhurried experience - this is helped by velvet-voiced narrator Michelange Quay. If there is an excess of poetry at times, this listener was won over by the kindness which surrounds the whole enterprise, and the way it brings voices of disadvantaged people into the heart of Mount Stuart’s splendour.

If there is a problem, it is that visitors are unlikely to pause to listen to a complete track (20-30 minutes each), and might pick up only snatches given the muffled sound quality in some rooms. The olefactory sensations, too, are more present in some spaces than others. It is to be hoped people will scan the QR code and listen in their own time.

Hayley Tompkins’ new work for Modern Institute is both a series of individual paintings and a complete installation of paintings and painted twigs, which make bright lines on the walls. Part abstract, part representational, the paintings seem to reference or suggest places; the twigs, perhaps, are physical tokens of place which the artist has transformed with colour.

In the three large paintings, particularly, there is a sense of a physical space being described. In the title painting, Surroundings, there is shelving to the left, and a plant or vase of flowers, though the right side of the picture is entirely abstract. Much of Transceivers is black, though there is a suggestion of a doorway on the right, leading to another interior space. Or is there? This is the challenge with semi-abstraction: the clues are there so we try to figure it out, only to find representation shifting away from us.

Perhaps the artist is more interested in the process of working intuitively than in any result that can be pinned down. There is certainly energy in the way the paint is applied, in daubs of discrete colour, and in the way the paint goes beyond the rectangular boards to cover twigs, the cuffs of a shirt, a tie. One gets the sense that there is meaning in all this for her, but it’s harder for the viewer to find a way in.

Across the way at Aird’s Lane, sculptor Jesse Wine presents two bodies of work, or one body of work in two styles. The centre of the room is occupied by big figurative sculptures made of coated clay: figures reduced to torsos and thighs, expressive and lumpen on big square plinths.

Around the walls are tableaux outlined by twigs cast in bronze, stages in which delicate forms - a dried flower, a sliver of moon - seem to float, light as air. They might be the work of a different sculptor were they not linked by the presence of a heavy bronze hand or, in one case, foot. Outside, on the triangle of grass next to the gallery, is a bronze work which seems to sit between the two approaches, but is also different again, calling to mind the fractured figures of modernism.

Inside, the two approaches set up a dialogue: what does it mean for something to be heavy, or light? What about something like the moon, which is heavy but looks weightless, or a cloud, which is weightless but can feel heavy? If meaning is too literal, does it become grounded, rather than being lightly held and mutable?

Wine engages with some of these questions, and more. The title adds another dimension: time - which is weightless but can also weigh heavily. We all have a finite spell in which to figure all this out.

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Meanwhile, Osama Al Rayyan, who was born in Damascus and now lives in Switzerland, has his first Modern Institute show in the Bricks Space. His paintings blend imagination and observational drawing. There are figures: a man in profile, his face slightly downcast; a figure with their back to us, a pair of legs suggesting the reclining form of another.

Al Rayyan blends colours from a rich palette of oranges through yellow to green. Narratives are hinted at - he has said literature is an inspiration, particular Latin American magic realism - but these pictures don’t tell us complete stories. He can suggest a space without fully describing it, and is sensitive to the fall of light: we always know if we’re indoors or outdoors.

There is enough, here, to hook the imagination, to draw the viewer in. There is a stillness which is intriguing. There is enough to tell us there are depths in these surfaces, and invite us to spend more time with them.

Thomas Abercromby: Recovery Island runs until 19 October; Hayley Tompkins until 29 October; Jesse Wine and Osama Al Rayyan until 25 October

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