This show offers viewers a whistlestop tour through some of the most exciting emerging art practices engaging with Scottish landscapes in 2023. A selection of works (all created by graduates from Scottish art schools since 2018) is pitted against the historic prevalence of representational painting within Scottish landscape art; there’s also a related concern with visual aesthetics which, the exhibition copy argues, risks devaluing the ‘ecological worth’ (and fragility) of Scottish landscapes.

Pieces by Katie Taylor (whose sequential, suspended squares of glass seem to melt into viscous liquid) and Siobhan McLaughlin’s earthily toned collage works on recycled materials dramatise some of the issues at stake: the rise of marine waste and the ominous tick-tock of warming temperatures. Elsewhere, the focus is more on landscape as a setting for struggles of human identity and society. Iman Tajik’s remarkable photographic series ‘The Dreamers’ shows him symbolically transporting a flag made from an emergency safety blanket across remote terrain, reminding us that Scotland’s depopulated countryside has historically been (and continues to be) a site of forced migration.

At certain points, an emphasis on landscape falls away, but the general cogency of the curatorial thread carries us through. A special mention, by the way, for Brandon Logan’s beautiful and unusual minimalist hangings. Created from string caked with acrylic paint and recreating the atmospherics of seasonal floral blooms on Orkney, they suggest that aesthetic concerns in responding to landscape might not be so dead after all.

Scottish Landscapes: A New Generation, Dovecot Studios, until 7 October.