The stone for the “Crowd Sculpture” for Harbottle Park in Byker arrived yesterday. As you can see from the pictures they are not small lumps. The largest weighing 5.5 tonnes and the smaller one 3.25. It was a tense and eventful couple of hours trying to get both pieces into an upright position and without a piece of clever thinking from the crane operator we may still have been trying yet! The work is due to be installed in Novemeber so needless to say, I will be spending most of my time over the next
couple of months carving the designs, provided by the nearby residents of Harbottle Park, onto the stones. I will continue to post pictures of the sculpture as it progresses.
This is one of the 2 rocks that will be used to create the sculpture in Harbottle Park. It is a 5.25 tonne lump of Peak Moor (Derbyshire) sandstone. At the moment it is on the quarry floor but soon it will be having a base cut and then it will be delivered to my workshop where I can finally start to carve the dozens and dozens of faces into it. Fair enough, it doesn’t look much at the moment but in a couple of months it will be standing proudly in a park in Newcastle overlooking the Tyne, the Sage and St.James’s Park. Watch this space….
Between a rock and a hard place.
The crowd sculpture for Byker
This is how the sculpture for Harbottle Park in Byker should look when it is finished. I have selected the stone for the work so know the size and shapes of the blocks that l be heading my way soon. The community have provided me with over 200 drawings that can be used in the sculpture, all that remains is for me to design and carve them into the 8 and a half tonnes of sandstone that is shortly to be arriving at Hall Farm. Hopefully they will be ready to install around November time. Unfortunately, the stones are going to be too big and too heavy to get inside the workshop so will have to be carved outside. In that respect, some good weather over the next couple of months would not go amiss. The stones are in the process of having flat bases sawn at the quarry to aid their standing up but I will post more pictures when they arrive.
On monday I trundled accross to Leicester with a load of stone in the back of the “custard coupe” . It is the 4th time I have run workshops in Rushey Mead School and it has become a slick operation. The school have breeze block workstations set up ready and even a selection of tools (that the head of D and T picked up from a car boot sale!) so that we can get more children carving during the 3 day workshop. 26 children took part this year, working in pairs in short bursts they set about researching, designing and then carving their sculptures. This years group were particularly hard working, many sporting blisters, there was barely a moan until the final afternoon when they were all clearly shattered. Some good stuff was produced, not least by the 2 lads who hacked their way through their block to create a hole in the centre of their “comet” sculpture. Well done to all who took part.
Next week, the “custard coupe tour” continues up to Newcastle where I will be running some workshops around the Harbottle Park area in Byker. These are related to a large sculpture that I will be making there in September. During the workshops, those taking part will be asked to think of a moment during a football match that they have watched or played in. They will then record their expression during this moment, firstly in a sketch but then into a stone which they will carve themselves. Their designs will then be taken away and incorporated into a crowd scene sculpture that will be sited in the park around November time when I have carved it. From the site of the sculpture, Newcastle Uniteds St. James’s Park is clearly visible, hence the football theme. (They are also all football mad round there too!)
Work by the students of Rushey Mead School
It is an exciting project and I am looking forward to seeing the sort of ideas that I can use in the finished piece.
