WALKING IN GARDENS

Look, I’m not trying to turn this into a project or anything but last weekend I was walking 

around The Cotswold Sculpture Park, near Cirencester (the actual address is Somerfield 

Keynes) - my third sculpture park of the year. 

 

You could argue I was actually walking in two sculpture parks – see the Google map below-

 

the other one being the Elemental Sculpture Park, but I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. There was also the Zimbabwe Loop, home to this very fine pangolin by Tonderai Sowa.

 

Now, some people have told me they think a sculpture park is a good walk spoiled.  The walk in the park or garden, they say, would be more enjoyable without the art.  I don’t agree with that, obviously, but I think there’s something to be said for a comparatively small and crowded park.  The Cotswold is ‘just’ 10 acres and contains about 200 pieces.

 

 I like the experience of walking along, turning a corner and seeing, for example, an old engine transformed into a dragonfly.  This one is by Ed Hill.

 

How different from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (500 acres) where you see a chunk of art half a mile away and have to yomp over hill and dale to get there.  Though maybe that’s the point.

 

Admittedly the art in the Cotswold did not have the name-brand recognition of the art in Yorkshire – not a Moore or a Goldsworthy or a Hepworth in sight.  But brand recognition isn’t everything.

 

Back in the day when I occasionally used to find myself in a room with Benedikt Taschen, the very rich publisher and art collector, he always said he didn’t enjoy going to major art museums because you couldn’t buy any of the art on display.  A Giacometti would catch your eye at the Museum of Modern Art, but no amount of haggling would allow you to snap it up and take it home with you.  No such problem at the Cotswold Sculpture Park - with a few exceptions, the art was for sale.

 

And if they weren’t in the Damien Hirst price bracket some were not cheap at all – the polar bear below titled ‘Boris’ was quoted at 250,000 quid (‘will consider offers’).

Of course I liked some of works of art more than others, but I think what I liked best were some sculptures made from car exhaust systems – in the US they’d be ‘Muffler Men.’  I couldn’t see that these were attributed to any artist but perhaps they were and I missed it.

 

They weren’t hidden, but they were kind of lurking in the woods and the undergrowth.  And some of them were walking.  Not very far or fast, but definitely walking.

 

Also, while in Gloucestershire, I met a man who told me I really should go to a sculpture park in Trenton New Jersey, called Grounds for Sculpure.  It sounded well worth a visit.

 

OK, so maybe I am, kind of, turning it into a project.