The great, dark quadrangle of the University of Edinburgh glows with light. It comes from a colossal sheet of what appears to be fabric hung between classical columns. Fields of cream, gold and rust, with sporadic blue waves and scarlet spots, suggest topographies with coastlines and cities. Then an August breeze riffles the surface and you realise that everything you see is made of fragments of metal: tiny tessellations somehow woven into this glittering swathe. It is one of the most dramatic curtain-raisers in contemporary art.
The veteran Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b 1944) made this masterpiece with the flattened caps of liquor bottles, their tags and labels, all stitched together with copper wire. It speaks of long and infinitesimal labour in a land of historic enslavement. There is a direct yet poetic connection between the exquisite sight and the recycled detritus of colonial trade. And there is much more of Anatsui’s stupendous art through a quadrangle door and into the Talbot Rice Gallery upstairs.
