KARLA Black and Kishio Suga have never met. Black was born in 1972 when Suga (born in 1944) was first making an impact on the Japanese art world. The former is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, a nominee for the Turner Prize (2011) for her very physical, pastel explorations of common materials. The latter, emerging onto Japan’s art scene in the early 1970s as a primary exponent of the “Mono-ha” (School of Things) movement, works in natural and raw materials, juxtaposing the industrial with the natural, exploring the connectedness between materials and the "mono" – things, or objects.

Walking through this dual exhibition of their work in the later stages of installation at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, as lights are adjusted on the frequently large scale works below, Julie-Ann Delaney, Senior Curator at the SNGMA, curator, tells me that the gallery has long wanted to do a major exhibition with Black. The idea of bringing her together with Suga seemed to create a new and different way to present both the artists’ work.

“There are a lot of similarities in terms of use of materials,” says Delaney “but there are also a lot of very interesting differences.”

Certainly there’s a real interest in the properties of materials. And this is wildly tactile stuff. Never mind worrying about the kids touching the stuff – you might have a hard time suppressing the urge to dive in yourself. Black, who produces all new work here, uses cotton wool with what can only be described as wilful abandon. There are acres of the stuff – fluffy, smoothed, teased, painted and pooling on the floor in sumptuously fluffy layers, sprinkled with pastel powder, like a giant powder puff. The artist's footprints sink into the surface like footprints in the snow (Too Much about Home, 2016).

A suspended work of diaphanous plastic sheeting (Other Civil Words, 2016) is as fragile as the cheap plastic bags it is often used to make, but it is luminous when the sun shines through the gallery’s vast windows, and – like all of Black’s work – has a crucial mass that belies its flitting substance.

The largest work, albeit two works, could be described as a patchwork cotton-wool quilt (Can’t Regard, 2016) hung on the rear wall in front of the uncovered windows – a rare treat of views to the gallery’s lovely surroundings – and a giant suspended swag of cellophane (Recognises, 2016), which the artist has splashed with a paint that drips and oozes its way onto the floor and walls below. These works are fragile but weighty, physically tenuous, the cotton wool and acrylic panels of Can’t Regard seeming on the edge of disintegration.

Suga’s work, interspersed with Black’s, is all taut lines and connectedness, although the latter in entirely unobvious ways. There are swags here too, but it is the swag of galvanised steel fencing (Condition of a Critical Boundary, 1972/2016), hoicked up to the ceiling, cutting off all but a small sliver of floor space. Materials are balanced in and on each other. A thick plywood “shelf” sags slightly under its own weight, held in place only, it seems, by the counterbalance of a large rock pinning down the next run of wood.

There is the mesmerising Left-Behind Situation (1972, etc), a continuous interwoven mesh of wire on two levels at the intersections of which are placed pieces of wood, rock or metal. The wood all comes from the local area, including a tree in the gallery grounds which blew down in the storms. Twang one wire and the whole lot would come crashing down in one ever-increasing vibration.

If much of what Suga presents here is a reiteration of a past work, each one is carefully made to fit the space. Edges of Gathered Realms (1993) is a series of stones and rocks laid out as if subject to some mysterious classification on a zinc sheet which is variously cut to push up little “plinths” or markers. There are the documentary videos, too, of his fascinating "Activations", improvised interventions in the natural and industrial landscape.

Suga has created one new work for the exhibition, Interconnected Spaces (2016), a large rock placed in what appears to be the middle of the room, under which two opposing ropes are held down, their ends suspended from the midpoint of each of the rooms four walls. Only it is not the midpoint, when you look closely. The whole is slightly off, wrong-footing the sense of proportion that it naturally underlines. There is a wonderful simplicity to it, a mental provocation that is bigger than the sum of its aesthetically pleasing parts. And there again, too, in the background, the glittering autumnal colours, the vibrant yellows and reds of autumn outside. Connections, everywhere.

Karla Black and Kishio Suga: A New Order is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art: Modern One, Belford Road, Edinburgh until February 19, 2017

www.nationalgalleries.org.uk