Last autumn we went on holiday to North Yorkshire (it is an interesting part of the world, and I recommend it highly). One of the places we visited was Flamborough Head, a great chalk outcrop that juts into the sea below Scarborough. Growing up in the West Country and living in the flatlands of East Anglia, I enjoy an occasional trip to a good cliff, to remind me what verticality looks like. I was not disappointed by Flamborough Head, except that I thought it was a pity the council had put signs all around the edge reading 'Please be careful in this cliff-top environment'. For goodness sake, if you're going to patronise people's intelligence then at least make it snappy, something along the lines of 'Danger. Do not fall over the cliff' or 'Falling 120m can be fatal'.
After admiring the Head we went down to the South beach, and being a keen beachcomber I kept my eyes largely on the ground. I was rewarded by a large pebble with a hole in it, which immediately disappeared into my coat pocket. I'm sure there is a by-law against taking stones from the beach, and so there should be, but that must be meant to stop you taking stones by the sackful, not one special pebble. We made it back to the car without being apprehended by a council warden, and the stone came home with me to Essex.
I wanted to display it in the garden as a sculpture. Having tastes that run to Barbara Hepworth and Eric Gill, and a budget that runs to B&Q, this was the nearest I was going to get to my own Henry Moore. I could provide a found plinth, in the form of a section of old telegraph pole, but was utterly stumped by the practical problem of how to mount the stone on the plinth, except by having something specially made. This defeated the aim of the installation being entirely a found object, but the stone was heavy and my metal working skills non-existent.
(We had the remains of four telegraph poles, because the phone line to us and about twenty other properties, including the lettuce farm, used to run alongside the edge of the wood. After years of trees falling on the line, BT finally realised it would be sensible to move it, and the lettuce farmer said they could put it along the side of his field. It was in his interests, since it is difficult to run a salad enterprise with no telephone. I never felt particularly guilty about our trees falling on the phone wire, since it was clearly a very silly place to have put it in the first place. BT were happy to leave us with the sawn off poles instead of carting them away, and we were happy to keep them).
I initially visualised a bronze holder like an acorn cup, but bronze was out of the question. I toyed with the idea of an iron cup, but began to worry that when water collected and froze in the holder, the stone might shatter, and settled on an iron spiral. The first time I made an appointment with a local blacksmith, I went hurrying round there straight after work as agreed, and the forge was shut up and nobody there. Cursing him as a time-waster (and it was a very nasty right turn back on to the main road) I tried Tatam's of Wakes Colne, which was a further drive from home but looked a professional set-up. The current smith is the third generation on this site, his son is being trained in the business, and before coming to Essex they were blacksmiths in Cornwall, so smithying is fairly in their blood.
I explained what I wanted, we agreed the diameter of rod to use, and I had to leave the stone with them. It is brittle, being chalk, and I had awful visions of it being accidentally dropped and smashed on the smithy floor. I felt quite ashamed when I went to collect the finished support, and the smith showing me how the stone fitted in the holder unwrapped it from its bag with the delicacy of someone unfolding a rare piece of antique lace. I realised that when you spend your days working with lumps of red hot iron you don't randomly drop things, but learn to move with as much control and precision as an instrument maker. The fit was incredible. The pebble is flatter on one face than the other, and will only fit only one way round into the stand, which then holds it snugly. That was beaten out by hand, from a material that shrinks as it cools. The smith had been unwilling to quote me a firm price before starting, explaining that he didn't know how long it would take, but reassured me that I was looking at somewhere in the thirty to fifty quid range, not hundreds. In the event the bill for my tailor-made, bespoke piece of ironwork, finished in exterior grade black paint, was thirty-five pounds. I thought this was very good value, and urge anybody in the area who needs a piece of ironwork to go and support Roger Tatam, Original Ironwork.
Last week we installed the piece. My partner succeeded in mounting the stand vertically in the telegraph pole, which is something I could not have done. The proportions of the stone and stand together relative to the height of the plinth is based on the golden ratio. Here is the complete installation and here is the stone in close-up. It is aligned so that if you look through the hole, it frames a statue of the buddha who sits in front of the wood (and next to the septic tank), but I couldn't work out how to photograph that. I think you need to have got beyond autofocus. A friend suggested placing it to frame the rising sun at the solstice, which was a good idea but I'm not sure where I'd have put it to achieve that, and the effect would only work once a year, whereas the buddha is there all the time. It acts as a good eye-catcher to lead your eye across the bottom part of the garden, and the plinth will be useful for running the hose around when I need to water down there.
I don't have the faintest idea if it's Art, but I like it.
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