MORAG MACINNES overcames her maths block to enter the imaginative world of Steven MacIver.

PAY ATTENTION at the back there! My abiding memory of the maths class is of the teacher – a clever, good, nice teacher – running his hands through his hair in despair and saying ‘for goodness’ sakes girl, it’s obvious!!! ’

Not to me. The beauty, symmetry and delight of all things mathematical passed me by, though I was very fond of the gadgets, the set square and that thingummy you drew the circles with. I loved making patterned paper doilies, cutting shapes out of folded paper and then opening out a lovely symmetrical design, different every time yet the same in its differences. I spent ages with my kaleidoscope. I liked looking at crystals under the magnifying glass. I just didn’t like the maths bit.

Game Space (oil on canvas, 150cm x 120cm) - Steven MacIver

Imagine my alarm, then, when I hear that MacIver, a young Orcadian artist out of Grays, the Slade and the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School in Rome, is interested in ‘game space’. The picture in the paper looks like an awful lot of architectural, ruler-ed lines and squares. The drawn line is ‘an end in itself…re – evaluating the environments I encounter,’ he’s quoted as saying.

Aberdeen University and Arts Trust Scotland funded the year he took travelling an imaginary line – N 41 – drawn round the globe, hence the exhibition’s title. He visited, for example, the brilliantly named Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. He began by being interested in ‘the role of the home ground within the community’ and ended with, well, something completely different.

As soon as I’m in the Corridor looking at two pencil and paper works, ‘Ladders’ and ‘Domes’ (the more I visit the Pier, the more I realise how vital and interestingly diverse each exhibition space is, and so will you, as you move around –the tight little Corridor invites you in, and gets you up close to the art quickly) I think two things.

One – this man uses a pencil the way we did on the edges of homework notebooks and rough drafts, building up shapes, using soft shading and hard edges. (OK, some of those kids’ doodles might have been of cowboys, lions or unclothed ladies – but I mean the spirals and squares and triangles and flowers that grew round the edges of the history notes).

Two – it’s like M C Escher, the Dutchman whose work you may know from infuriating jigsaws made from his late meditations on the Mobius strip – a two dimensional strip with only one side which plays about with our ideas of what’s possible (told you to pay attention…).

Some of the titles echo Escher as well – Recreation 1, 11, 111. Game Space 1, 11 ( Metamorphosis 1 and 11 are important milestones for Escher).

‘Ladder’ is decorative, almost feminine in its careful, controlled expert gradation of shading and texture – an inhabited space, with curtains, chenille, fishing net, buoys, wood, steel, busy yet beautifully contained. ‘Domes’ alerts us to the artist’s love affair with geometry.

Opposite these, we’re plunged into ‘Game Space 11’ It’s like diving into a net ( or the Matrix – I’m half expecting Keanu Reeves…). The colour’s warm and persuasive – wine, red and violet with sudden sparks of bright green.

I have a daughter who is obsessed by the Japanese strategy game Go. She and her partner travel the world to spend weekends doing incomprehensible things with small stones on a board which looks very like this large oil painting. It’s a metaphor for life, the Go game, I suppose – all about strategy and capture – and very three dimensional, on a two dimensional plane.

The precision of the brushwork is remarkable. To the Long Gallery – another two Game Spaces, opposite each other on the two end walls – one blue and grey, all lines and squares, so the odd curve comes as a real pleasure – the other like, for want of any other description, a fakir’s rusty red bed of nails, except that there are little rectangles of pure colour here and there, like lights in a skyscraper at night.

Escher used sketches as a geometric grid, from which to design his own characters, filling that plane. He is close to my heart because he never understood the maths he was doing, except through his art – his notebook, Regular Division of the Plane with Asymetric Congruent Polygons, developed purely from his own desire to make graphic design – he never graduated, never was a success at school.

In the same way that phycisists use simple words – like string, or big bang, or butterfly effect – to investigate complex ideas, Escher used art. I think MacIver does too.

Recreation 1 and 111, and Gold Rush. Big canvases, sitting well in the space. They’re elegant, a bit like public art at first glance – you could imagine them in a bank or a shopping centre. But look closer – there’s real subtlety in the texture under the celebration of line that’s going on. Recreation 111 is cool – it’s a bit like what I’d imagine looking out of a new York hotel window twenty floors up in rain might be like. I’m betting scaffolding really rocks MacIver’s boat…

Gold Rush is dynamic, with the same underlying sneaky texture, a very natural one this time, brown shadowy natural hints like tree branches, overlaid again by jaggy blues and golds.

The Room off the Long Gallery is another tight little room, fairly dark and intimate. There are more small pencil works here – rather like notes from the artist to himself about the possibilities of texture. Crumpled paper; flawed cubes, graph paper, but empty of people, in a de Chirico kind of way, as if everything in the space is waiting for somebody to come along and sort it all out.

I expect the artist is that person.

Just as I’m getting a bit mathed-out (Escher, as a child, ‘with care, selected the shape, quantity and size of his slices of cheese, so that, fitted one against the other, they would cover as exactly as possible the entire slice of bread’, and I’m starting to want to throw a lot of Smarties around crazily ) – we reach the Seaward Gable End, my favourite room.

Beyond two young herring gulls on the pier outside, at the school’s Maritime Studies Department, the wooden fire escape and the gang planks round the boat slip echo the severe verticals inside this space – heating ducts, for example.

And bang! The wonderful Form1 – an older work from 2004 – seems to birl away in ever decreasing circles (a circle, at last!) like the Star Ship Enterprise. It’s a football stadium seen from above, a millennium dome in black white and grey, a gas ring. Go closer and it’s full of cogs and wheels and a spider-webby network of spaces enclosed by lines.

The background, again, is subtly smudged and distressed. The techniques here are remarkable – such precision, yet a kind of freedom inside the confines of the geometry. Refreshed, I head for the Double Height Gallery – which is exactly what it says it is.

There’s a series of wonderful surprises here and I hope when you visit you leave it until last. The titles are a clue – East is East. Blossom. Akasaka. Candlestick. Worship. There’s an expansion happening. The palette suddenly changes – to a stunning, subtle grey and mauve and pink, muted, not jazzy like all those Games and Recreations, not twitchy, but gentle and thoughtful.

Gloss paint contrasts with matt, isolating shapes and glinting in the lights. Extraordinarily, the room is an emotional experience – still shape-based, investigating what Escher called the division of the plane, still a meditation on inner space and containment – but charged with feeling.

Like MacIver, Escher travelled a great deal, and also like MacIver, became interested in decorative tiling, particularly in the Alhambra Palace in Grenada.

I don’t go to artist’s talks on their work on purpose, because I prefer just to see – and the Pier staff are great and always helpful, but I tend not to ask them much either, unless it’s about something very practical, for the same reason.

But Carol Dunbar tells me that Worship – a stunning architectural observation of a church, Byzantine-like, representational, precise, tenderly coloured, began the series. From there MacIver moved to work which is, I think, growing in confidence, daring, even playful. Akasaka is like a city, laid out yet isolated.

Candlestick is gentle, all curves, as pale as if it’s seen through a layer of volcanic ash – the football stadium shape again, but seen in a new, much kinder way. Blossom invests geometry with depth – maybe a flower the way a bee sees it? Little ticks of light seem to disturb the grey and black petals, and there’s a Mobius strip infinity feel about it – we want to invest it with movement.

It’s fascinating to see an artist build in strength. He has engaged patiently and carefully with the cold hard shape that I thought was maths and is making it move and change in ever more complex ways.

Escher said ‘in mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically… mathematicians have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered the domain themselves. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it.’

Steven MacIver is learning to have real fun in the garden.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

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• Pier Arts Centre