Tag: sculpture

November 20th – In Kings Hill Park in Darlaston, there’s a lovely recent sculpture. Paid for by lottery funding, it represents the resurgence of nature post-industrialisation, and the globe of leaf and bird silhouettes is stunning. 

Each side of the supporting plinth is a cast metal relief depicting aspects of local history and life; industry, the zeppelin raid, football and other iconic aspects of Darlaston culture. I particularly liked the bike and horseshoe nails.

It’s a commanding and fascinating thing in a great location, and I could look at it for ages. So much better than a lot of such commissioned work, this has a real feeling of being of its community, without feeling contrived, or art-by-numbers.

The fact that it took real artistic skill to create also helps.

A fine thing.

October 31st – Since it’s coming up to Remembrance, it’s a good time to feature these poppies, on the railings of Kings Hill Park in Darlaston. They make me smile every time I see them; beautifully made, I think they’re beautiful, and they make me smile overtime I see them.

October 1st – Autumn is certainly coming to Catshill Junction and Clayhanger Coomon, as the deciduous scrub here turns golden. On this drizzly October evening, despite the murk, it looked beautiful. 

I note the building taking place on the former Bayley House site is coming on well, but the sculpture on the far side of the water is being rapidly claimed by the scrub.

I do hope it doesn’t get forgotten there.

August 28th – A bit of a strange day. I wasn’t planning on going to work, but ended up called in anyway. It wasn’t a bad commute as it happened, and the journeys were pleasant. On the way home, I passed over the The Bridge in Walsall town centre. It was while there that I spotted something I pass by loads, that is really part of Walsall’s furniture; the concrete hippo. It occurred to me that I’d never featured it here before.

Derided and loved in equal measure, this 1970s artwork has formed a meeting point for a couple of generations of Walsallians. Up until a decade ago, the hippo basked outside BHS, and teenagers, before mobiles and social media would agree to ‘see you by the hippo at 12 o’clock’ or somesuch.

For a while, the hippo image was even used to advertise the Walsall Show.

The story of how our town came to have this bizarre object is complex and not without some debate, but I think all true Walsall folk love it. There is talk of a renovation, of fixing the broken ear. I hope they go through with it.

Walsall is full of surprises. A concrete hippo – without any apparent rhyme or reason – is just one of them. And it’s lovely.

February 12th – a rough video, but it fascinated me. The sign hanging on the inside of the Walsall Wood Pithead sculpture was swinging well in the wind.

I hope it’s attached top the frame better than Bob the Fish was attached to the Walsall Wood Fisherman, which was by the same artist. Bob the fish famously escaped captivity and is presumably still living the life of a trophy fish somewhere in the locality. 

Probably best not to stand in close proximity to the pithead during a gale…

January 5th – The Lammas Land isn’t at it’s best this time of year, but it is still nice to ride along the quiet trail. Running the length of the Footherley Brook along the northern perimeter of the village, it’s a lovely community project and facility, of which the villagers are rightly proud.

I’m not sure, however, about the Shining Stone. A stainless steel sculpture standing in the brook by an old pedestrian bridge on the footpath to Ashcroft Lane, it looks like some alien dropping polluting the water. 

Put in place in 2002 and designed by artist Jo Naden, it’s said to take inspiration from the derivation of the name ‘Shenstone’, meaning shining or beautiful stone. It was stolen by metal thieves in 2010, to be found in a scrapyard in the Black Country, from whence it was returned (the material it’s made from isn’t that valuable as it happens).

The inscription reads ‘A flock of birds settle the green field re-echoes where there is a brisk bright stream’, an Irish traditional verse.

So help me god, it looks like some metallic turd. But the way the water swirls around it is fascinating.

An odd thing, to be sure.

November 15th – It had been a long day, the energy was low, and I didn’t have much time. I spun up the High Street at teatime and rode the backstreets for a bit. Returning, I looked at something thats so familiar, I rarely pay it much attention: Morris, the Brownhills Miner. Much as I feel uncomfortable with the extravagance in a faltering town, I do love him. John McKenna’s work in drafting all those fragments, then welding them together in a finite-element model like this is stunning, and always has been. So much better than the laser cut by numbers tat in Walsall Wood, this took a really skilled artist a huge amount of time to design, facilitate and build. I just wish the blue lights didn’t make it look so cheap.

Morris is such an obvious and cliched subject, I’ve only rarely featured him here, but it’s worth it, once in a while, just to share him. The politics and cost aside, it’s a terrific thing.

October 18th – I’ve been in Darlaston all this week, and Kings Hill continues to pique my interest. As well as some great faded architecture, this characterful post-industrial borderland between Walsall and Sandwell contains a really great park. Recently refurbished Kings Hill Park – which I erroneously referred to as King George Park in an earlier post for some reason – is hilly, wooded and beautiful. There’s a wonderful new sculpture, and the whole place is wearing autumn beautifully. Emerging into Franchise Street, I admired the view of St. Matthews, Walsall over the rooftops. There are some fantastic old houses here.

Darlaston is full of surprises.

November 18th – Today I made time to take a quick photograph of the concrete play sculpture at Chasewater, featured in a post on my main blog. It was created in 1962 by artist Bryan Blumer as a climbing object for kids, and originally stood in the play park. As Anne Bradbury says, it now somewhat ironically stands on a traffic island with notices requesting kids don’t play on it. Sad.