The Daily Telegraph - Features

Catholicis­m, rally cars and epic tapestries

Edinburgh Art Festival

Various venues

★★★★★

Edinburgh Art Festival has always had to contend with a noisy neighbour. It’s a strange experience, leaving the relative calm of an art gallery to join the feverish melee of tourists and street performers that colonise the Old Town each August under the banner of the Fringe.

Then again, what sets EAF apart from similar city-wide visual arts events is a quality that chimes with the ethos of the Fringe. People flock to the latter to see theatre production­s or comedy shows to which they might not otherwise be exposed, before the kinks are ironed out for Live at the Apollo. Works-in-progress, that is.

Moving between the city’s galleries and museums, it is likewise possible to glean an exceptiona­lly rich and varied sense of the processes that go into

The headline act is Chris Ofili’s The Caged Bird’s Song, a triptych that’s 7.5m in length

the making of works of art. Take the show at Dovecot Studios, close to the Royal Mile. The headline act is The Caged Bird’s Song, a tapestry triptych nearly 7.5m in length, realised under the direction of one-time YBA Chris Ofili. But before you get to it, a beautifull­y precise display shows exactly how the master weavers at Dovecot transforme­d Ofili’s small watercolou­r, a mythopoeic vision of contempora­ry Trinidad, into a hand-woven epic that preserves through warp and weft the bleed and blur of the paint.

Similarly, at Edinburgh Printmaker­s, have a peek at the studio on the top floor to see where the Nigerian artist Ade Adesina, flitting between the stations for lithograph­y, etching, screen-printing and linocut, has