WE are, surely, living in the optimum moment for outdoor visual arts. That is particularly true of artworks that address themselves to the pandemic.

Praise is due to Edinburgh Science Festival, therefore, for programming artist Luke Jerram’s new piece In Memoriam as part of its extensive al fresco art offering. This touring installation work is both a memorial to those whose lives have been taken by Covid-19 and a tribute to health workers.

Consisting of a series of blue and white NHS bed sheets which flutter like flags from tall metal poles, it is currently located in Edinburgh’s beautiful Royal Botanic Garden (free ticketed entry must be booked through the Garden’s website). If one could get a bird’s eye view of the piece, one would see that it is arranged in the shape of a medical symbol (a blue cross in a white circle).

“Changing minute by minute”, the text accompanying the exhibit explains, the fluttering bed sheets make “invisible air currents visible”. This relates, the text continues, to both “our capacity to weather the pandemic” and “the winds of change that will leave us better prepared to face whatever the future might hold”.

With the best will in the world, it is difficult not to be irritated by the credulity-stretching pretentiousness of this extended pun. One is irritated, not least because, without an explicatory text pointing us in this direction, the work itself does little to promote such thoughts and feelings.

At this juncture, I must insist that I am not the kind of critic who considers all contemporary abstract art installations to be, in the words of then UK culture minister Kim Howells’s famous comment on the 2002 Turner Prize, “cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****”.

I regard the work of Rachel Whiteread, for instance, to be among the finest visual art of recent decades. Interestingly, like Jerram’s piece, Whiteread’s art is often commemorative.

The difference is, like all great art, the power of a Whiteread piece is intrinsic to itself. Like the historically specific, yet universal, paintings of Goya or Picasso, Whiteread’s capacity to engage the emotions is not dependent on an accompanying text.

Jerram is, I’m certain, entirely well-intentioned. I’m also sure that he is convinced that his memorial and acclamatory concept is borne out in his artistic practice.

The problem is, as one looks upon In Memoriam, and, indeed, follows the artist’s injunction to walk through it, it is only the knowledge that the flags are made of NHS bed sheets that evokes any sense of this as a memorial art work. Otherwise, ironically, the atmosphere of the piece is medically sterile, rather than emotionally evocative of the experience of the pandemic.

The National:

Elsewhere in the Botanic Garden one can see Kerry Wilson’s graffiti-style portrait of leading conservation geneticist Dr Aline Finger (above). It is one of nine art works in the Science Festival’s “street art trail” celebrating “women in Stem” (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths to you and me). Vibrant, colourful, celebratory pieces, these art works are a tremendous way of recognising the, ludicrously, still too often neglected role of women in the various scientific fields.

Shona Hardie’s pictures of Dr Kathy Sullivan (the first woman to walk in space) and Helen Sharman OBE (the UK’s first astronaut) can be seen outside the Dynamic Earth museum and at the Citadel Youth Centre, respectively.

Hardie’s painting of pioneering mathematician and computer scientist Anne-Marie Imafidon (which is on Lothian Street) is particularly arresting, combining a monochrome portrait of the subject with bright, pastel-coloured illustrations of Imafidon’s work.

Edinburgh Science Festival continues until July 11. For the full programme, visit sciencefestival.co.uk