Tim Taylor: Bending Saws

Custom Lane

67 Commercial Street

Edinburgh

until February 12

www.customlane.co

Tues – Sat, 10am – 5pm

WALK around the back of Leith’s newly revived Custom House and you will find the recently opened Custom Lane, a design initiative which is built around an exhibition space, workshops, studios and a cafe. It is also the permanent new home of the excellent Edinburgh Tool Library – also to be found on Saturdays in a police box on Leith Walk – who are planning community workshops alongside their core tool rental programme.

The key, here, is design, although the remit is broad. The exhibitions programme, which opened before Christmas with a showing of Craft Scotland’s Custom: Made, comes under the direction of Tessa Pierce, formerly of the Open Eye Gallery. Bending Saws is a solo show by artist and architect Tim Taylor, who, inspired by the Edinburgh Tool Library and the building’s maritime history, has created an exhibition of reimagined tools that elevates the everyday.

Taylor, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1995, has most recently completed a site specific series of miniature worlds under the glass floor of Glasgow’s new Maryhill Health Centre, although other work has been less concrete. He once swam the "hidden watercourse" of every private and public pool in Edinburgh from the hills to the sea in a single day for the Edinburgh Art Festival. And his latest work, titled Bending Saws, plays with concepts and expectations.

The aptly titled Site Specific Work pokes fun at the notion of the site specific, comprising a series of four tape measures whose extendable arms that can fit any wall, in any form, up to 20m. Held is a series of 12 saws, bent to form a circle in which they are held by their own tension. Elsewhere, Taylor has created 110 “spin drawings”, made by spinning sanding grits at high speed and marking them with the traces of three trades – a dressmaker’s chalk, a carpenter’s pencil and a builder’s line maker. Taylor will give a talk on his work in the Custom Lane cafe on Wednesday at 6pm.