Exhibition – Response

by Amanda Hirst

 ‘Response’  Into The Light

Currently OPEN at Aberdeen Art Gallery

Aberdeen Artists Society is delighted to be working with Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums again and this time, its members have created new work in response to pieces already within Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums’ collection.

In 2023 we provided insight into our spaces within ‘Where Ideas are Born’, the Magnum Photographic exhibition of artists’ studios. In 2024/25’s ‘Process, Process, Process’ exhibition, we shared knowledge of our development methods and showed tools and materials that we use.

This new exhibition continues the artistic development and explores each artist’s response to the original works and the diversity of those interpretations from the same start point. Responses include many different media and perspectives.

The selected works are on display in Aberdeen Art Gallery from 24^th January to 24^th May 2026.

Insight

Keith Rand RSA (1956 – 2013) was a British sculptor who worked primarily in wood. Rand was born in Rinteln, Germany and was a boarder at Woodroffe School in Dorset by the age of 13. He later trained as a cartographic surveyor before enrolling at Winchester School of Art. The artist went on to work part-time as a technician at Scottish Sculpture Workshop and held a teaching position a Gray’s School of Art before moving back down south.

Into the Light was a 2011 exhibition in Winchester Cathedral. Exhibiting works in a non-gallery setting was quite usual for Rand and Into the Light proved to be very successful. His work showed a maturity in both his techniques of steaming and bending wood, as well as his style with coloured interiors to his sculptures. Rand considered the total sculpture as an entity, and the inner faces of his sculptures were as important to the overall feel of the piece as its outer faces, the benefits which can be seen in the two featured works from the collection, Into the Light, Blue and Into the Light, Crimson.