Hollywood is reviving 3-D this year. Soon we will all be wearing those comical cardboard glasses that made 1950s cinema-goers resemble the bug-eyed martians in the science fiction films they so loved.

Now studios are pairing up digital high definition with old-tech 3-D in live action movies such as Avatar, made by the Titanic director James Cameron. All of Dreamworks’ animated pictures this year will be 3-D and Disney will re-release classics like Toy Story in the format.

If silly specs soon become as common as super-sized popcorn in our multiplexes, you still don’t expect to find buckets full of them at the entrance to our esteemed art galleries, least of all the classical confines of the Royal Scottish Academy on Edinburgh’s Mound. But this is the work of Calum Colvin, the sculptor, painter and fine art photographer, who possesses one of Scotland’s most vigorous imaginations. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Colvin’s new show, Natural Magic, is inspired by Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), the largely forgotten Scottish polymath who popularised 3-D in Victorian Britain.

The technology was initially developed by an Englishman, Sir Charles Wheatstone, who made the “mirrored stereoscope”, which places reflective surfaces at 90 degree angles to create the 3-D image.

But it was Brewster’s more compact lenticular stereoscope in 1849 that became a national craze, displacing the aspidistra in many a Victorian parlour. Friends would be invited round in the evening to peer into the box and be suitably impressed by, say, the pyramids at Giza in three dimensions. Queen Victoria was so taken with Brewster’s invention when she visited The Great Exhibition of 1851 that she ordered one for the palace.

Colvin’s work has always played tricks on the eye. He constructs detailed interiors, replete with ornamentation, symbols and found objects. He then paints figures over these sets, confounding our sense of perspective: a picture of the composer, James MacMillan which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, sees the subject’s face interwoven with his desk, sheet music, and metronome. In Natural Magic, Brewster’s craggy features and Victorian whiskers emerge from a stepladder and easel. Colvin always captures the final, multi-layered scene with his camera. But this exhibition takes him further into the realm of illusion and confusion.

“I was really interested in the idea of the image existing just as a mental construct,” says Colvin. “Any stereo image is actually in your head, either through a mirror stereoscope or a lenticular stereoscope. There’s no surface, it disappears because of the three dimensionality. It takes my work back to sculpture, to what it was originally, a three-dimensional painting.”

Four portraits — of Brewster, Wheatstone, Robert Burns and Lord Byron will be viewed using large mirrored stereoscopes constructed by Colvin. One particularly striking work is viewed through a lenticular stereoscope. Others are anaglyphs: the gothic skull that features in the exhibition’s poster floats spookily on several planes once you don the cardboard glasses.

Like all Victorians, Brewster, who also invented the kaleidoscope, was fascinated by phantasmagoria, the travelling shows that thrilled audiences with spectres and ghostly apparitions in the days before cinema. Brewster was drawn to the science behind the enchantment, as is Colvin. The exhibition’s title is taken from Brewster’s: Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, published in 1832. The novelist, like Robert Burns before him, popularised the supernatural while Brewster sought to deconstruct it.

Colvin, who received an OBE in 2001, is a soft-spoken wirey man who looks younger than his 47 years, though he complains that a career spent painting awkward corners in his sets has left him with a damaged back. He is both verbally and visually articulate — an artist of ideas who likes to talk about them too.

“I remember going to see the Creature from the Black Lagoon as a student, wearing these glasses. I didn’t realise then that that process goes back to 1830 and that Scotland played such a part.”

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