COMMENT

IN a building that has been compared to an upturned boat, the first artwork that visitors to the Scottish Parliament will see is itself a fishing vessel.

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Coble is a painted wooden representation of a flat-bottomed boat.

How fitting it seems that

the building's art collection has been launched by the feisty elder statesman of Scottish art.

What is striking about the parliament's collection is that while it touches on many of the themes of Scottish life and culture - fishing, oil, medicine and landscape - it does so without recourse to tartan cliche or sentimentality.

There is heather here, but in the hands of artist Glen Onwin in a major commission called Mosses, Rebels and Wolves, it has been waxed and pigmented out of recognition.

From the accomplished minimalism of the painter Callum Innes to the sensuality of Alison Watt and the quiet documentary photographs of the youngest artist in the collection, Claire Wheeldon, any visitor should form a picture of a Scottish art world that is healthy, diverse and confident.

The stand-out piece is undoubtedly a work by Christine Borland, Small Objects That Save Lives, a wall of small individual photographs created when the artist invited members

of the public to send her objects in response to the

title.

The images which include a bar of soap, a button, a condom and a packet of Lemsip are a reminder amongst the whirl of politics and policy of what it means to be human.

That the collection could and should be bigger is without a doubt. That the strictures of working in a building in which the rhetorical flourishes, so far, belong more to the architect than in the debating chamber has caused problems for the hanging of the work is clear.

But that a confident, commendable start has been made ought to be celebrated.