We recently installed another art work in the back garden. This was the culmination of an incredibly protracted process, that started three years ago, if not four, when I saw a sculpture I wanted in the Museum Selection catalogue. It was the head of a Muse, Thalia as it happens, the muse of comedy, and I liked it very much. However, I didn't want to pay the full price for it. The catalogue has periodic sales, so I tracked it until the head was reduced. Obviously the risk you take is that the coveted item never makes it to a sale, but I thought that if I failed to get this one, something else would turn up, and held my nerve. Until the first reduction, that is. I decided not to press my luck and wait for a further drop in price.
The head arrived in spring 2010, and spent the summer living on one of the chairs in the study. I liked it there, but it used to give visitors rather a turn, and even the Systems Administrator forgot it was there sometimes, and would get a shock going into the room. Come the chilly autumn nights we moved back into the study, and the head was banished to the spare bedroom. The reason for the delay is that I was trying to work out what to use as a plinth. I imagined the head tucked into a shady corner between two trees, hovering above me on a tall classical column. I don't like fake pillars made out of drainpipes. A proper classical column swells in the middle and tapers towards the top. I think this idea owed a lot to the wonderful pillars salvaged from the old Coutts Bank in The Strand by Sir Frederick Gibberd at his garden at Harlow. However, classical columns around 2m tall don't seem very easy to come by. The artificial stone companies sell them, for unbelievable amounts of money, and I found a company that made them out of weatherproof plastic, but they cost a small fortune as well. Also I couldn't work out how I would get the pillar to stay up, mounting it as a freestanding object on soft ground.
After we used a piece of telegraph pole for the holey stone, I considered using a longer section of that, but my partner said that a classical head would look silly on an old telegraph pole, and how did I propose to get the pole to stand up. When we started stocking Haddonstone at work I eyed up their plinths, since by then I had begun to realise that a 2m column in my chosen corner would put the head up inside the crown of the trees. However, the reconstituted stone plinths, besides being expensive, weighed 65kg, and I didn't see how we were going to get one to the bottom of the garden without rupturing ourselves. The answer seemed to be that the plinth needed to be hollow, to reduce the weight.
I ended up buying a black terrazzo finish concrete cylindrical flowerpot. It is not remotely classical in inspiration, but looks not unlike the plinths used in exhibitions at The British Museum or The Royal Academy. (I'd found a supplier online who made rather nice MDF plinths, but I didn't think they'd last outdoors). The only drawback with the flowerpot , turned upside down, is that the base is not graphite coloured fake marble, but plain concrete. This problem was solved by buying the smallest and cheapest pot of black acrylic paint that our local art shop stocked. (They are very good that way. I once went in to get some cobalt blue paint to renovate a table, and the chap ahead of me in the queue wanted paint for his outdoor model railway). My partner had advised getting a sample pot of black Sandtex or similar, but I couldn't find small ones, or indeed black, in B&Q. Maybe I was looking in the wrong aisle. The painted base, seen sideways on, from a distance, in shadow, blends in perfectly well. If it fades I can always retouch it, since I have most of the pot of paint left over.
The nervewracking bit was attaching the head to the plinth. We thought she should be bolted down in some way, to stop her blowing off. As she was going to fall onto soft earth she would probably have taken no harm, unless she chipped herself on the edge of the flowerpot, but I want to walk down the garden and see her in place, not find her lying on the ground with earth on her face. My partner is the technical expert in such cases, and said that it would be possible to drill a hole in the base of the head, which was clearly hollow, and that it would not fragment into a thousand bits. The plinth, being a flowerpot, came with a handy hole already in the centre, so we could bolt the head through the top of the plinth (formerly the bottom of the flowerpot). I was rather glad not to know when the drilling operation took place, but the head duly emerged from the workshop with a neat 15mm hole in the base of the neck. A threaded rod was fixed to the head using a spring butterfly clip, a washer fitted, the rod fed through the hole in the plinth, and a bolt fastened inside the pot. It took a bit of packing to stop her from wobbling, as the washer held her slightly proud of the top of the plinth, but she was finally in place, about fifteen months after I bought her.
She is a 21st century copy of a Roman copy of a Greek original. I don't mind her being a copy. After all, I look at reproductions every day on the internet and in books, so why not in a garden? Classical statues have formed part of the English garden tradition since the Grand Tour took off. I can share the culture, I just can't afford the original. It would be nice, though, to find more modern art intended for garden use. We look at the statues every year at Chelsea, and most of them are unbelievable kitsch. (I can't decide which are worse, the fantasy goblins or the badly-drawn-from-life small children and labradors). And most of them are made out of bronze, and cost a lot of money. There seems very little on the market between those and the concrete statues on offer at the less upmarket garden centres. Why some enterprising person can't come up with some attractive original designs that could be affordably manufactured in modern materials beats me. My partner says that the head of the muse is made out of polyester, which is the P bit of GRP as used for yacht hulls, without the glass reinforcing bit. A project for some of our young design graduates, instead of them all wanting to fill the RA with tables covered in bags of maltesers.
The head has two functions in the garden. One is as an eye-catcher. She is hidden by vegetation from some directions, then you find her as you go around the corner, and see her across the lawn. When I did my year two Design module at Writtle a tutor wrote on one assignment that I needed to think about the placing of focal points. I have been thinking about it ever since, though he might have expanded on his feedback a bit. The head's second funtion is to symbolise the mind, then as you go on around the garden you get to a terracotta nude torso by Dominique Keeling of the Whichford Pottery (body) and the seated Buddha (spirit). The holey stone doesn't symbolise anything, it is just a stone, though the white of the stone and brown of the telegraph pole plinth have been placed to echo the colour of bark of the neighbouring birch tree. I forgot to mention that before.
I tried to take some photos for you. I am one of the world's most inept and reluctant photographers, and my camera didn't appreciate standing in bright sun and being asked to photograph statues in deep shade, but here they are.
Head of a Muse the Maiden the seated Buddha
and in case you've forgetten what it looks like the holey stone.
I have planted a couple of yews behind the head of the muse, to try and get it so she is seen against a dark green, inpenetrable foliage background, instead of the rabbit fence as as present. These sculptural installations take time.
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