The strange turquoise flame motif, the ghostly presence of a drowned mariner, and the turbulent storm of painterly marks which cunningly reverse the roles of figure and ground combine in ways that manage to be both romantic and ridiculous. They speak to me of a knowing watchfulness from beyond the grave, a ghostly awareness of the risks and rewards of harnessing energies from beyond the edge. Equally they communicate a sense of wondrous absurdity that a painter might have managed whilst painting, to invoke the spirit of these things at all.

This is a typical recent work of Wright, combining in strange synthesis oppositions and sophisticated improvisations whose naivety (my mother mistook the painting for a drawing by my six year old niece) is beautifully academic. It is shot through with imagination. It has a profoundly intelligent, sensitive and canonically astute combination of a love of the intuitive manipulation of the outer edges of painterly representation and a coolly analytical eye for visual complexity.

I love it.

Black is a sculptor. She is quite insistent on this point, even though her works sometimes hang on walls like paintings, or transform entire spaces like installations. She works with materials such as paper and plastic daubed with moisturiser, hair gel, fake tan – even, occasionally, paint, in a palette of pale, ethereal colours. The works respond to the space they are in and usually last no longer than the course of the exhibition.

Body moisturiser may be the single biggest component in this show. Climbing the stairs to Mary Mary, you catch the sweet, cloying smell of it. In Surplus is a Given, the largest work here, it is smeared on the floor and used to create patterns of uniform lines, occasionally dotted with cream of a different colour, paint or petroleum jelly. It’s impossible to look at this work and not imagine the process of making it, the tactile messiness of it.

Black started out making performance work, though more recently she has removed her own presence, she says, to allow a more direct relationship between work and viewer. Yet there remains a sense in her work that we are witnessing the aftermath of a performance, albeit an intensely private one.

In other works here she uses cotton wool, toilet paper, plastic and Sellotape. The latter is transformed in Contact isn’t Lost: strips of clear tape are suspended floor-to-ceiling, then made shimmeringly visible by smudges of chalk dust. The final work in the show, Strength is an End, is the most fragile and the most ethereal. Small piles of chalk dust have been deposited on the floor and gradually smeared by footprints, or just by the passage of air. It is barely even mark-making, more the suggestion of the possibility of a mark, yet there is a deftness about it.

Black distances herself from gender-based interpretations of her work, pointing out, rightly, that these are only ever applied to women. But she distances herself from other interpretations too. All she gives us by way of guidance here is a quote from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves about distrusting the “neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper”.

So she is striving for complexity, not clarity. But art is about communication, and this is where many young artists fall down. Black does not. Her work has a confidence which tells us she has plenty to say, even if she prefers not to say it directly.

A handful of streets away, at the Modern Institute, is another artist whose star is in the ascendant: Gregor Wright, a near contemporary of Black’s, who also trained at Glasgow School of Art. Wright is primarily known as a painter, although he also makes sculpture and exhibits groups of drawings.

His work is unresolved and spontaneous. His paintings hover between pure abstraction and part representation. If one element in a painting suggests a scale or perspective, another undermines it and flattens everything into shape and colour. But there is a sense of vigour in the way the paint is applied, a revelling in the materials for their own sake.

He too supplies us with a guiding quote: “Things only really become interesting when they start to stop making sense.” So there’s no point in trying to crack these works as if they have a code. They are deliberately disordered because he wants us as viewers to find our own order in them, and see what that tells us about ourselves.

The sculptural work in the show, Decomposition, is cleverly named. It looks as though it’s in a state of disintegration, with its fragments of wood and precarious balancing pieces. Yet it is not an anxious piece of work – liberally populated with coloured dice, it is bold, even anarchic. It is a kind of composition in reverse, challenging the kinds of ideas much art takes for granted.

Finally, we come to a room of drawings – 85 of them, presented in neat rows. Some are little more than a handful of marks, others include recognisable, even recurring forms. Made with crayons, they are confident and slapdash, playful and vigorous. They don’t suddenly make Wright’s work easy to understand, but they do tell us much about the spirit in which it is made.

A visit to the Changing Room gallery in Stirling always feels like a special treat. This might be down to its setting – the gallery is tucked away in a shopping arcade, rather than huddled together with other spaces in an artsy ghetto, or standing aloof on a grubby side-street impending gentrification – or the layout, which has visitors clamber up a dimly-lit stairwell before entering the bright light-filled exhibition hall. More than these accidents of geography and design, though, it is the Changing Room’s consistent and unerring knack over the past decade for mounting thought-provoking group shows that prompts such a sense of anticipation.

And with Tender Scene it has done it again, presenting works by Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson and Gregor Wright that fizz with unexpected connections.

Pollard – who, as well as exhibiting, curated the show, billed as a ‘collaborative installation’ – dominates the proceedings. Building on Black Marks, his recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, Pollard continues to mine a rich seam of thematic concerns, centring on the seedy glamour of the New Romantic movement, with nods to the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, and to jesters, clowns and fools in general. While Black Marks was a rather overwhelming installation, with a batch of 3ft wide bronze medallions and huge wall drawing looming over the vast number of paintings on show, the trio of new works here have a quieter, more meditative air about them, as if, freed from the pressures of a major solo outing, Pollard has relaxed into this still-new strand of his practice.

These works, like all Pollard’s recent output, are monochrome, with a deliberately limited palette ranging from deep black to dark grey. Comet shows a tangle of snapped lipsticks, wonky eyebrow pencils and heavily distorted lines and numbers, only just recognisable as bar codes, with an overlapping set of forms that might be the trail of the titular heavenly body, or the hairspray-stiff fringe of a New Romantic. Jester is a faceless entertainer making himself up with the gooey contents of a make-up bag, while Grey Argot is Pollard in self-reverential mode, presenting an amorphous blob of a cartoon speech balloon made of more sticky lippy that might almost serve as a painted manifesto for his current work.

Fiona Jardine’s contribution, They Became What They Beheld, runs alongside Pollard’s fascination with masks and make-up. A pair of photographs show a figure seated on a plinth, his two-piece suit protected by a paper boiler suit. In both images, the face is obscured by a bulbous spherical helmet, bearing a triangle in one photograph, a star in the other, a sinister update to the sock and buskin masks of classical theatre.

Clare Stephenson is concerned with theatre, artifice and disguise, too. Miss Verily- Existent and Miss Quite-Transcendent are, a note informs us, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. They star in two drawings, both clad in ruched metallic robes based on repeated forms borrowed from medieval church sculptures, both with sinister porcelain doll faces and awkwardly animated limbs, both performing beside mysterious wooden structures of unguessable purpose.

And then there’s Gregor Wright, who knocks the whole show off-balance, like a past-tipsy gatecrasher stumbling uninvited into a private party. An untitled work shows what appears to be a Thermos flask rendered in disconcertingly fleshy pink. Every Extend Extra sees a set of cubic forms piled up like refugees from a game of Tetris gone rotten, while Caffeine is a cartoon portrait of a grinning little chap, steam billowing from his head. In the centre of the room sits Metamorph, an awkward, lumpy construction jury-rigged together from off-cuts of Styrofoam and wood panels, a low-rent Transformer robot caught in the act of shifting from man to machine.

Wright is a peculiar proposition at the best of times. His unfinished aesthetic and deliberately slapdash methods are hugely attractive, not to mention good fun, and the studied incompleteness of his work offers a winking challenge to the viewer, who is invited to finish off what Wright has started. Here, surrounded as he is by a trio of artists who are, if not party members, then at least fellow travellers, bound together further by subtle alterations to the gallery space – the floor is striped like an Everton mint, and patches of wall are covered in dazzle ship-like camouflage patterns – he sticks out like a sore thumb.

And yet, these blowsy works fit with the quieter, more considered pieces around them, acting as grist to the mill, or sand in the Vaseline. Without Wright, Tender Scene might have been a rather ordinary group outing, a decent-but-uninspiring look at a group of artistic allies. With him, the lines connecting Jardine, Pollard and Stephenson are drawn more clearly.

But rather than presenting the work in the forum of a group show, the artist’s work will be exhibited as a collaboration, with elements of all four being mixed together. Jardine’s work usually responds to architectural dimensions and fixtures of the space, covering walls in prints, raising areas of the floor and installing faux doorways (her recent exhibition at Sorcha Dallas gallery also included photographs and sculptural elements).

Pollard’s work also responds to, and interacts with, the gallery space, with wall drawings encircling more traditionally realised sculptures, paintings and drawings. Drawing is also central to the practices of Stephenson and Wright – both artists works presenting two distinct stylistic trends: a series examination of two-dimensional artistic reality and surreal attack on the fragmented figure, respectively. Stephenson’s work contains representational elements, set in impossible special configurations, while Wright draws expressive part-objects, questioning the expressive power of the line he utilises.

This exhibition will act as a mini-retrospective of some of the aesthetic preoccupations and considerations that many Glasgow-based artists are tackling, and will bring the work of some rarely exhibited artists to the fore.

Gregor Wright’s controlled explosion of angry little drawings take a risk, and dare to hint at a traditionally expressive line, minus irony. His work is already being watered down and has found its way into art student sketchbooks. Kate Davis wants you to sit for her on a stool in front of her drawings, as she presents you with pre-emptive sketches of you being brained by her imagination, whereas Kevin Hutcheson’s watercolours and collages show boredom filtered through the illustrator’s flattening eye.

Haley Tompkins’ gouaches literally record the edges of abstraction, referencing still via Twombly. A few of the drawings/paintings are reductions rather than resolutions, but her pages hold together as a statement of sorts. Sue Tompkins’ text-based work is equally as fleeting, marrying concrete poetry and snippets of empty information and conversation. The work is reminiscent of notes by performance artists or Fluxus instructions, and may seem to be a bit out of place, but does attempt to expand the overall scope of the exhibition.

A fresh sheet of newsprint is successfully met with a stifled excitement in Sally Osborn’s watercolours, where the aqueous medium drips off her slightly wet forms. Representation is shown simply to be a process filtered through monitored perception in Alex Frost’s superrealist graphs. The subject matter may seem intentionally arbitrary, but the minute ciphers add up to something that makes you think otherwise. These works seem more confident than some of the others, but this is often the case when as intricate and time-consuming process dominates traditional expression.

‘Country Grammar’, a new exhibition of Glasgow artists at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, takes it names from a work by Sue Tompkins. Tompkins is a wonderful shape shifting artist whose work is impossible to pigeonhole. She is an inspired performer, a poet and a visual artist. She was a singer and a writer with the much-missed Glasgow band, Life Without Buildings. She is an improviser, a mercurial, energetic presence and – in the context of this exhibition, which advertises itself as a drawing show – she makes drawings.

Tompkins’s drawings are made with a typewriter. You might find another word to describe them: concrete poetry, text pieces; it doesn’t really matter. When Tompkins performs her work live, she reaches across many oral traditions: punk, English folk song and good old-fashioned religious preaching. Her subjects are immediate yet elusive: love, sex, everyday conversation, abstract repetitions and incantations.

When you see her works bashed out on yellowing paper, on that piece of discredited old technology, the manual, ribbon typewriter, what does seem to matter is their physical shape: the interaction between the words and numbers and the shape they make on the pages.

Columns of figures lurch and fall. Repetitions create great blocks of type, which are eroded by the fading ink of her machine. Works and ideas slip and slide across paper, like they do in the mind. But they are given a particularly visual form.

Words and numbers have a long history in art. Francis Picabia painted an arithmetical sum as an act of dry irony. Joan Miro included a column of figures in his painting in an attempt to get beyond the conventions of representation in painting and as a reflection on his own failed career, totting up numbers as a book-keeper. Tompkins seems to use them for their immediacy, for their swiftness of communications.

‘Country Grammar’ features seven artists. It’s a show about the role of drawings, but it is also a catch-up with series of youngish and influential Glasgow artists, increasingly admired here and abroad.

Sue Tompkins’s twin sister, the Beck’s Prize shortlisted Hayley Tompkins, goes from strength to strength. A new series of abstract works on paper mixes loose blocks of colour with suggestive line. Images seem to appear – I can see perhaps a book, an open door, a crossroads – and disappear back into pure abstraction.

ate Davis’s work Three Forms Study is a complex installation: a drawing of a plinth, a plinth itself and the drawing of an ancient sculpted head from the Burrell Collection. It raises questions about the nature of drawing, the idea of modelling and display and perhaps, too, of the representation of women. The ancient head appears to be hollow behind her lovely hairdo: an empty vessel.

Gregor Wright has produced a wall of small drawings: punkish, brusque and blunt, unresolved equine figures, body parts and weird geometries that might be working drawings for sculptural works.

Alex Frost, who has a concurrent show of new work at Stirling’s changing Room, shows two of his vast systematic portraits which use a grid and his own system of pencil symbols – stars, circles, crosses and dashes – to produce photo-realist portraits. One is a portrait of fellow artist Karla Black; the other is of the artist himself. Frost’s work draws contrast between systems and accidents, the modular and the hand-made. In his self-portrait you can’t see his face: just his coat and his ear.

Sally Osborn, who has recently been pushing the boat out on odd ways of making drawings – watercolour on broken crystal was particularly memorable – shows a loose series of figurative drawings and abstract works on tissue paper.

Kevin Hutcheson has been making work using books and bookishness for some time now: sculptures made from paperbacks, drawings and collages that call upon book illustration and the graphic style of pulp fiction. His recent works show libraries and readers. An archive photo shows a reclining women absorbed with almost comic sensuality in a tome. In a sense Hutcheson is drawing nothing, we can see the moment of absorption perhaps, but we can’t see the content, that visual information which runs exclusively between the readers and the book. He has literally drawn a blank. This is a good, confident show, slightly blighted by the rather grim setting, which is without any daylight. Lest you protest that ‘Country Grammar’ might have too wide a definition of what makes a drawing, it’s best to count your blessings. The Royal Academy’s recent drawing show, curated by Allen Jones and David Hockney, included a video of cardiac surgeon Francis Wells, who as a means of swift communication during surgery, is wont to draw using his forceps as a pen and patient’s own blood as an inkwell.