It’s that point in the year when a lad and lass think it’s time to walk around the City of London, a place that in general have no reason to go, in order to see Sculpture in the City, a now annual project that puts sculptural artworks in among the zesty new buildings (and some old ones) of the City’s insurance district.
In fact it lasts much of the year and as they say in their publicity ‘it’s completely free and is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days week,’ but we always seem to end up going there on an autumnal Saturday morning when lots of other people walk also around the City, staring at the buildings, peering at maps, looking vaguely lost. Some of them are no doubt there for the sculpture though many seem to find them a big surprise when they come across them, as with these folks discovering ‘Earthing’ by Jocelyn McGregor.
It has snail shells and human parts!
Inevitably some of the works of art strike you more forcibly than other. I was particularly taken by Jesse Pollock’s ‘The Granary,’
And below is ‘Miss’ by Emma Louise Moore which is carved from Carrara marble, and apparently becomes translucent when the sun hits it, although on a slightly grey morning in late September you had to take their word for that.
But I was there, at least partly, to see some work by Isamu Noguchi, who’s become a recent interest of mine, though not yet an obsession. In fact there were three sculptures of his, all grouped together in St Helen’s Churchyard: Mountain, Duo and Neo-Lithic all made from galvanized-steel and which according to the literature ‘express his (Naguchi’s) lifelong engagement with sculpture, the landscape and the bodily sensorium.’ I don’t believe I’ve ever previously typed the word sensorium. They looked like this:
To be honest Noguchi’s work looked rather low key compared with the bells of whistles of many of the other sculptures, but the quietness was part of its appeal.
There obviously is some connection between walking and sculpture. Sculpture is one of the few art forms you can actually walk around, and certainly when the sculpture gets to any size the sculptor has to walk around while making it.
Noguchi made works such as ‘Walking Void,’ ‘In Silence Walking,’ ‘Large Walking Box,’ ‘Little Walking Box,’ 'Man Walking.
This is ‘Man Walking’
This is 'Walking Void#2.’
Noguchi did once say 'I want sculpture equal to myself walking.’ I’m having fun trying to work out what he meant by that. Here’s a picture of him walking.
And here for reference, as alluded to in my title, is a walking city as conceived by Archigram
