EDINBURGH.- As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2015, Ingleby Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Charles Avery.

In 2004, Charles Avery embarked on what will be a lifelong project titled The Islanders: a painstakingly detailed description of a fictional world that functions in parallel to our own universe, realised in drawing, painting, sculpture and text. These large-scale, narrative drawings and sculptural installations question our ideas about the nature of time, place and being.

The Island is located in the middle of an archipelago of innumerable constituents, and its heart is the port of Onomatopoeia. This town was once a stepping off point for pioneers and travellers, then a bustling boomtown, then a slum in a state of extended decline, and now in the fictional present, it is reborn as a regenerated city of culture and a tourist destination. Our exhibition presents a new series of drawings alongside furniture, sculpture and artefacts, presented as souvenirs and objects from The Island itself.

Coinciding with The People and Things of Onomatopoeia is a new site-specific work by Charles Avery, commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art. For this, Avery is presenting a tree from The Jadindagadendar, the municipal park of Onomatopoiea, in the midst of Waverley, Edinburgh's main train station. This tree, cast in bronze and ripe with strange fruit, draws on mathematical equations for its design and stands over five metres tall.

Born in Oban in 1973, Charles Avery lives and works in London. The first most comprehensive presentation of The Islanders project The Islanders; An introduction was exhibited at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London in 2008 and toured to The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 2009. In 2007, Avery represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

The People and Things of Onomatopoeia is on view at Ingleby Gallery from the 13th of July until the 3rd of October.