Sculpture: Keith Rand - The Grain

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 4 Mar 2023

This impressive wooden sculpture sits outside the Gorgie Road entrance to the Sainsbury's supermarket at Murrayfield. It must be getting on for fifteen feet high and consists of a number of wide planks which have somehow been unstraightened in such a way that they are now wave-like. (Hot water and some chemicals may be involved; this is how wooden chairs get their curves I was once told.) I could see no plaque, and this is probably the first proper picture of it online. Which is surprising, as the sculptor was relatively high-profile (there's a fairly long Wikipedia entry), and Sainsbury's must have shelled out a lot for it. It is definitely one of his however: references are made twice online to a commission for an Edinburgh Sainsbury's, and there is an almost identical credited artwork of his in Canary Wharf, London, up online on WikiCommons. His connection to Scotland is that he worked as a sculpture technician (which sounds quite serious) and taught art for a few years at Aberdeen in the 1980s and 1990s. And his (probably unbeknownst to him) connection to Geograph is that he initially trained as a cartographer with Ordnance Survey, before finding his true calling.

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