THE Talbot Rice Gallery might wear its position as Edinburgh University's public art gallery lightly.

But its current suite of exhibitions brings contemporary art, academia and community collaboration together in a "very fitting" exhibition which mines both Edinburgh and the university's links with the medical profession, according to chief curator Pat Fisher.

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital (originally the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum), Ever/Present/Past is a project by Artlink, an organisation which aims "to increase opportunities to take part in the arts for those who experience disadvantage or disability in the east of Scotland".

Around a gallery of works created by patients of the Royal Edinburgh - for sale online - the Talbot Rice will display two major commissions.

In the Georgian Gallery, a close artist-patient collaboration has been made by Claire Barclay, one of the three artists chosen to represent Scotland in its first solo pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

In the larger white cube space next door, American artist Mark Dion will look a little closer at the Royal Edinburgh's somewhat convoluted history, as the medical profession felt its way towards an understanding of mental health issues.

Known as the Poet's Hospital, the Royal Edinburgh Hospital was born of a very Victorian philanthropy. Dr Andrew Duncan, physician to the poet Robert Fergusson, was so moved by the death of his patient in Edinburgh's horrific Bedlam asylum in 1774 that he became determined to provide something better for the capital's mentally ill.

Set up in Morningside in 1813, the hospital worked towards a model of psychiatric care which, by the 1840s, linked the health of the mind with the health of the body and gave patients mental and physical space and employment - from gardening to carpentry - around the extensive hospital grounds.

There is something of that ethos in Barclay's new commission. Working closely with former patients of the historic hospital over the past year, her piece works with contrasting material textures, demurring to the creativity of her collaborators, yet bearing her unique hallmark. "She's been very democratic about where her work ends and the collaboration begins," says Fisher.

Dion's commission, which constitutes his first solo show in Scotland, will comprise an ambitious and large-scale work entitled 200 Years; 200 Objects.

Scouring the archives of NHS Lothian - held, but not owned, by the university - Dion has chosen 200 objects to mark each of the two centuries of the Royal Edinburgh's existence, all of which will be displayed in a vast 15-metre custom-built display case.

Dion's brilliantly quirky taxonomical takes on the archives of a number of other major institutions - from a museum display case for the Tate 'cataloguing' finds from a summer spent digging in the Thames mud, to the Bureau Of The Centre For The Study Of Surrealism, a room of oddments scavenged from hidden nooks in the Manchester Museum - somewhat whet the appetite for what he might do with one of Scotland's mental health sector's most interesting institutions.

"As you might expect, he was keen to find the rare, the unusual and the quirky," says Fisher. "He was looking not for the obvious things from the historical canon, but the more human, personal story of hospital life." Objects range widely from keys that lock and unlock unknown doors in the institution to portraits of individual doctors, letters and other ephemera.

And as Dion's practice dictates, on the rare occasion that he was unable to find an appropriate object for any particular year, he has made one himself. "He is constantly questioning the veracity of the objects to tell a story," says Fisher. And that, given the long and tricky history of the treatment of mental health issues, has a very fitting poignancy.

Ever/Present/Past, Mark Dion: 200 Years, 200 Objects & Claire Barclay: Another Kind Of Balance, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (0131 650 2210, www.trg.ed.ac.uk, www.artlink) until November 16-February 15