As its name suggests, Summer Cocktail comprises an invigorating blend of styles and strengths which leave one feeling slightly less in touch with the day-to-day world on the way out than one did on the way in.
This reviewer's favourites included Lucy Jones's 'Blue Bear Café' (right): a familiar Canonmills scene here fragmented, refracted and reassembled as collage, monoprint and wax.
For all its apparent disjointedness, there is a solidity about its blues and blacks and central door recess which is particularly satisfying.
Drummond Mayo's 'Meditation' is similar, at first glance, although here the viewer must settle for an effect which is far less resolved. That familiar point one often reaches with Mayo's works, when a step back and a refocusing of the eyes reveals some hidden image, eludes on this occasion.
Instead one is left to wonder, to take time, ruminate upon this gentle dissolution. Perhaps, after all, it is purely abstract.
Patience is again required for Douglas Sneddon's 'Backstage'. I gave up trying to make sense of it all, and instead contented myself with taking pleasure in this particular mix of colours and tones, the sense of optimism, of excitement and potential behind the jumbled foreground.
Frank McNab's intriguing 'Poetry Boxes' are available together or apart, each containing the verse which inspired the image on the lid.
My favourite combination of words and image was the box inspired by Thomas Hardy's 'Faintheart in a Railway Train'. The poet's lack of resolution, courage, ability to seize the moment present an altogether more problematic instant than Edward Thomas's birdsong-haunted 'Adlestrop'. Hardy's is a recognisably disconnected, modern dilemma ... now, of course, generally sorted out not in heart-wrung poetry but on the next morning's Letters page of the Metro.
Finally, a word of appreciation for Barbara Franc's two beautifully realised and intricately wrought hares, only one of which appears in the image below. —AM
Summer Cocktail continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 2 August.