The title of this group show hints at two things: pity and paucity. London-based artists Emma Hart and Dean Kenning have selected works by 22 UK artists that explore the working class and lower-middle class experience through sculpture. You can almost feel a condescending head tilt behind the term ‘poor things’, and imagine hearing it being used to patronise someone while overlooking their strengths, abilities, traditions, joys and triumphs. Hart and Kenning were aware that class is often over-simplified as a difference in wealth, when in reality it’s about way more than a lack of money; it might also reflect a lack of time, studio space, health, contacts, know-how, confidence or opportunities. 

^{Dean Kenning's 'Renaissance Man'}

A lack of overflowing cash shows up frequently here in the use of some ordinary, affordable materials. While the ‘high art’ end of the sculpture spectrum may feature granite, marble, bronze or expensively finished ceramics, here instead we find rope, plywood, scraps of metal found in the street or bits of plastic bought from pound shops.

In ‘Pervading Animal’, Lee Holden has built a sort of sprawling, rainbow-coloured cyber garden out of glass bird ornaments, plastic shoe horns, mops and swirling electric cables. His makeshift zen paradise has been crafted carefully from cheap plumbing supplies and someone else’s discarded junk. As she considered issues around colonialism, toppling statues and the Black Lives Matter movement, British-Nigerian artist Josie KO wanted to monumentalise herself in a statue on a plinth. The Glasgow-based artist opted for low-budget papier-mâché when she made ‘Let’s Get Lost Tonight, You Can Be My Black Kate Moss Tonight’, a glorious, maximalist vision in hot pink and shimmering gold. Named after a Kanye West lyric, it towers proudly (or from another angle, submissively) like a bubblegum-coloured tiered wedding cake, topped with a life-size kneeling woman and her foot-high Motown-style curly beehive. 

There’s more hot pink upstairs in ‘Eat Me Now’ by Liverpool-born Chila Kumari Singh Burman, her sculpture of a giant 99 Flake ice-cream decorated with purple glitter and a garland of glowing lollipops. Dripping in everyday pleasure, it nods to her father who sold ice-creams when he arrived from Punjab in the 1960s. The thrills are practically palpable in Rosie McGinn’s ‘Oblivion’, where a row of tiny handmade figurines based on her friends and family sit on a fairground ride, eyes wide in a mix of ecstasy and fear as they hurtle through the air, with limbs and hair flying. 

^{Josie KO's ‘Let’s Get Lost Tonight, You Can Be My Black Kate Moss Tonight’} 

There’s a brilliant absurdity to Rebecca Moss’ ‘Thick-Skinned’, a video of herself wearing a costume of multi-coloured balloons like a maniacally cheerful Burryman as she plods through a field in the Essex countryside towards a barbed-wire fence. That piece is shown side by side with the video ‘Home Improvement’, where she wears a DIY invention, pulling her face into an awkward smile through a system of pulleys, coat hangers and watering cans. It’s hard not to draw an invisible timeline between the two pieces, a sense of impending danger in the first from 2019 and a forced cheerfulness in her pandemic work of 2021.

‘Crystal Landlord’ by Joseph Buckley is a sinister, mixed-media sci-fi and much-needed look at power imbalance and the profiteering practices of unscrupulous property owners through a fantasy character with snakes for feet. Housing also gets a look in through Laura Yuile, a multidisciplinary artist whose past work has examined themes of home, community and urban living. ‘Heavy View’ is a cluster of broken TVs, covered in beige and white pebbledash, that ubiquitous suburban wall covering. Shelter seems to have been on Jonathan Baldock’s mind as he created ‘Warm Inside’, a beautifully woven flesh-coloured basket in the shape of a massive monkey nut, dangling from the ceiling and wafting the calming scent of dried lavender at passersby.

^{Laura Yuile's 'Heavy View'}

Healing and harm, hedonism and hardship all find a place in this bright riot of a collection. Cheap thrills and fun sit alongside adversity and inequality, while a sense of agitation and injustice seems inextricably tangled up with the pursuit of happiness and respite. Not downtrodden or lacking but fizzing with anger and joy, Poor Things possesses the collective power of a handful of Mentos mints dropped into a Coke.

Poor Things, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, will show until Sunday 21 May.