I thought it would be interesting to revisit the Sculpture in the City project again having written about it a few weeks ago. There are also some sculptures that I have come across over the years that are not quite what they seem so I have included them as well.
First up from the project is Rough Neck Business by Mike Ballard …
The work is made up of hoardings sourced from several sites across London which have seen great changes over recent years and have been surrounded by hoardings for quite some time. Ballard is interested in taking this material, that normally represents a threshold of ownership and protection of property, and transforming it from sheet form into a 3d structure of its own, to be admired for its un-painterly qualities and the ‘witness marks’ of the time it stood on the street.
This is Murmurs of the Deep by Laura Arminda Kingsley …
The notes tell us that ‘here she creates a pictorial world in which our communion with the cosmos and nature is unmediated by cultural valuations or static ideas of identity. To accomplish this, Kingsley looks at the world through the lens of deep time, giving equal importance to; the microscopic and the macroscopic; folklore and science; and the archaic and the new, to offer the viewer a non-hierarchical perspective in which to reconsider their place in the world’.
Tatiana Wolska creates her sculptures using recycled plastic bottles. By cutting, perforating and thermo-welding them, she achieves sprawling, modular biomorphic forms …
‘By being light-weight these arresting forms can be placed within the environment in ways defying the laws of gravity. They can evoke floating islands of plastic waste or hold a strong poetic charge, appearing to be mysteriously suspended from the buildings or trees as if infecting the environment.’
The RedHead Sunset Stack captures a bit of the awe that seeing a beautiful sunset inspires in Almuth Tebbenhoff – reduced to the form of a large toy-tower …
‘At the centre the artist put a ragged and unstable human experience in pink and orange which is sandwiched between the steady blue earth and the red sun cubes. The earth and sun may be the only constants we have and even here we are at the mercy of incomprehensible forces.’
This work is my favourite and I make no excuses for showing it again …
The nearby notes tell us that the sculptor Jun T. Lai ‘created Bloom Paradise to symbolize hope and love. The artist’s intention was to bring greater positivity into the pandemic stricken world and release healing energy. The bright and colorful flowers call to an imaginative world, leading the visitor into a fantasy wonderland. Through this work, the artist hopes to bring positive energy and joy, a gift of life, to everyone’.
I think she has succeeded brilliantly. What a lovely vision to encounter as you leave Fenchurch Street Station on your way to work.
By way of further light relief, there are benches around the city with ‘memorial’ plaques devised by Oliver Bragg. This one made me laugh …
‘This project focuses on the everyman, the natural environment and memories to place and memory itself. A series of engraved brass bench plaques have been installed to existing benches around the City of London. The plaques have been created to mimic the plaques that often adorn benches to memorialise or pay homage to a specific person. These, however, are fabricated: in loving memory of a ‘made up’ person or place or abstract idea’.
I thought that, since we are on the subject of public sculpture, I’d take this opportunity to share with you a few examples of works that perform another function apart from the purely aesthetic.
This is Angel’s Wings on Paternoster Square by Thomas Heatherwick. The sculpture is actually a ventilator for an underground electrical substation …
The makers of the vents, the Heatherwick Studio, say that ‘the aesthetic design is derived from experiments with folded paper, scaled up to 11m in height; the vents retain the proportions of the A4-size paper used in these experiments. The Vents are fabricated from 63 identical, 8mm thick, stainless steel isosceles triangles welded together and finished by glass bead blasting’.
Paternoster Square also hosts this elegant column that has a striking resemblance to The Monument commemorating the Great Fire …
In fact it is based on Inigo Jones’ corinthian columns for St Paul’s West Portico, destroyed in favour of Wren’s design we see today. Look closely and you’ll spot grates under the base, a ventilation system for the car park underneath your feet.
The flaming urn at the top refers not only the 1666 fire but also the Blitz that destroyed most of the surrounding area …
I took this picture to illustrate its position relative to St Paul’s, although the weather was not ideal for photography …
And finally, another ventilation shaft. James Henry Greathead was a South African engineer (note the hat) who invented what was to become known as the Greathead Shield. He came to be here on Cornhill because a new shaft was needed for Bank Underground Station and it was decided that he should be honoured on the plinth covering it …
Designed by James Butler (1994) – Cornhill EC3V 3NR.
The Shield enabled the London Underground to be constructed at greater depths through the London clay. The miners doing the tunneling, using pneumatic spades and hand shovels, would create a cavity in the earth where the Shield would be inserted to hold back the walls whilst the miners installed cast-iron segments to create a ring. The process would be repeated until a tunnel had formed in the shape of a ‘tube’, which is where we get the nickname for the network today. A plaque on the side of the plinth shows the men at work …
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