A long time ago, I used to work in the Glasite Meeting House, tucked away on Edinburgh’s Barony Street, a structure erected in the service of God, now reincarnated as an art gallery. Built in 1836, the year before Queen Victoria came to the throne, and looking as much in its funeral dowds some 15 years ago as the monarch did in her later years, the quiet emptiness of disuse hung about it for decades. Upstairs, a grandfather clock ticked away the centuries behind a facade described as “very severe” in the Edinburgh volume of the Buildings of Scotland series. It is perhaps no surprise to learn, then, that the non-conformist Glasite sect’s “feasting” food some generations before, was kale soup.

For if the cramped offices downstairs, filled with various heritage organisations, were a jolly place,

stuffed to the rafters with books and folders and the paraphernalia of small organisations rubbing up against each other, the rest of the building was another matter, not least the ground floor Meeting Hall itself, into which

I was given a tour one evening by one

of my colleagues.

The heavy wooden doors opened on a dark, musty space, its high ceilings and glass oculus lost in the glare of lightbulbs, dominated by the hefty pulpit designed by David Bryce and filled with box pews that made the room difficult to use for any purpose other than dour sermonising. When we turned the lights out, the room’s ponderous atmosphere weighed in the darkness, its ghosts lingering in the gloom. You couldn’t call it haunted now, at least not early on a weekday morning, for this latest home to the Ingleby Gallery – Edinburgh’s contemporary commercial art gallery representing many of Scotland’s leading artists, from Jonathan Owen to Alison Watt, Callum Innes to the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay – is all light and colour. The Glasite Meeting House, much like kale, has had something of a revival.

The building has been literally opened up, opening the warren of doors and clearing out the clutter. The sun isn’t shining when I visit, but the light filters through the large 1830s windows, reaching the interior of the building in a way it never did when I worked there. When the sun shines it is spectacular, says co-director Richard Ingleby.

The Ingleby route to the new building was a circuitous one, a chance viewing in 2016 when a joint exhibition was mooted in the building, but rejected as the place was so stuffed full that you wouldn’t have been able to see the art. “It came up for rent a year later,” says co-director Florence Ingleby in her new first-floor office, but their reservations about the nature of the interiors, including the vast and thoroughly hefty stage pulpit and pews, alongside the enormous amount of “stuff” in the building, endured. The trouble was, says Ingleby, underneath it all, they really liked it too much. “It just sort of found us,” she says.

There’s a certain connection to their former gallery, the front room of their Carlton Terrace townhouse which was imbued with a sense of Georgian townhouse grandeur, despite the pared-back aesthetic. Their Calton Road gallery, which they inhabited from

2008 to 2016, vast in scale, was the archetypal white box with a twist, largely from its industrial heritage and finely crafted new fittings. The Glasite Meeting House is undoubtedly in a better location and its facade has been spruced up with new window lintels replacing the crumbling old, its dourly religious furnishings stripped back to reveal a more welcoming self. There are even velvet armchairs.

The key issue was the Meeting Room itself, and its cattle market-pen pews. The lot, or a representative sample, is stashed behind the new false wall that reduces the former meeting house chapel to two-thirds of its original size, now a bright square space under blind archways with the historic unmentionables behind the wall. Callum Innes’s new work (“Byzantine Blue, Delft Blue, Paris Blue”) is a good choice for this new room, with the ceiling’s sizeable oculus of yellow and detailed stained glass providing all the light. Innes’s work is saturated with colour, with the impression of light, the colours applied, scraped away, reapplied, scraped again, a dressing up and down of pigment, the seemingly sharp edges bleeding colour.

Dotted around the offices and kitchen, the newly named Feasting Room upstairs, all of which are open to the wandering public, are a collection of works from the past 20 years of the gallery, which opened in 1998 with an exhibition which included Innes.

There are rare Ian Hamilton Finlay prints in the kitchen, including his Poster Poem (Le Circus), a coloured ink circus in words. There is the Jonny Lyons’s Hoppickers (2018), Katie Paterson’s Ideas, Peter Liversidge’s somewhat humorous miniature stone effigies, his imitation gold-leaf cardboard Mask, an excavated 17th-century marble bust from Jonathan Owen. There are sea horizons from Garry Fabian Miller’s Sections of England, some relatively restrained Yellow Vases from Hylton Nel, a Francesca Woodman print. It’s an eclectic, colourful mix, although you can see the Inglebys’ mark in it all, and it suits this revitalised building – and the gallery itself – very well indeed.

Callum Innes/Twenty, Ingleby Gallery, 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh, 0131 556 4441, inglebygallery.com. Until July 14, Wed-Sat, 11am-5pm or by appointment

Don't Miss

Today is your last chance to catch Talbot Rice's show of innovative student work. Chosen by application from students at all stages of their education in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, there is work here that comes from under- and post-graduates, artists, writers and musicians, both working alone and in tandem. There is work that turns the real world into the digital and vice versa, aswell as many permutations inbetween. All, perhaps, have in common an interest in our place in the world, with the Anthropocene, with the state of human being and how we relate to the world around us.

Trading Zone, Talbot Rice Gallery, Old College Quad, South Bridge, Edinburgh 0131 650 2210 www.ed.ac.uk/talbot-rice Until 23 June Tues – Fri, 10am – 5pm; Sat 12pm – 5pm

Critics Choice

Margaret Tait, Orcadian filmmaker, poet and artist, made nearly 50 films in her lifetime, from her career beginnings at her Edinburgh base on Rose Street where she founded her production company, Ancona Films with Peter Hollander. Born in Kirkwall in 1918, she graduated in Medicine at Edinburgh, before war service and her subsequent training in film in Rome in the 1950s, the time of Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini. Her enthusiasm and energy led to a flurry of film-making, setting up her own film festivals with Hollander in her Rose Street flat. From Edinburgh, she moved back home to Kirkwall, continuing to experiment, producing a large number of short films and one feature film, “Blue Black Permanent”, all whilst working as a locum GP.

This major showing of her work, including her films “Colour Poems”, “Hugh MacDiarmid” and “A Portait of Ga”, presents a fascinating chance to see a cross-section of her work, including a number of her films, alongside poems and a rare opportunity to see paintings, notebooks and other archival material.

Upstairs, family duo Tam MacPhail, originally from California, and his son Paul MacPhail exhibit in tandem, with work from the sculptor, husband of artist Gunnie Moberg, and his photographer son, now based in Edinburgh. Tam Macphail produced metal, conceptual and kinetic sculptures, in Edinburgh, Argyll and then Orkney, where he moved in 1976 with his family.

Tam MacPhail, along with Tait, was a part of the developing art scene in Edinburgh in the 1960s. There is much here that traces that development and the place of these two very different Orcadian artists upon it.

Sarah Urwin Jones

Summer Exhibitions: Margaret Tait/Tam and Paul MacPhail, Pier Arts Centre, Victoria Street, Stromness, 01856 850209 www.pierartscentre.com