Snow at Bones Cabin Sculpture Garden, The Black Mountains, Walesland, 2022

The snow and ice and silence up here at Bones Cabin were a gift for me in terms of the photography

Prior to the recent frost I've struggled to photo the stuff, the sculptures and that around the cabin

 

it always seems to come out a bit ho-hum 

or lack lustre, or a bit banal, although the photos often seemed to work better in Black and White

The snow and ice and winter colour helped to outline things, or glamorise them, or simply re-present the stuff photogenically and I'm happy with these recent photos

I've been working on the sculpture garden itself, along with the sculptures themselves for a little over two years now and here goes!

A photo tour of the sculpture garden at Bones and a few thoughts along the way

This piece above is Bramble Piece is from a year or so ago, re-painted with a linseed oil paint in titanium white for the 2022 show

 

I love the way it holds the light right up to the end of the day

 

It's the last thing you can see as the light dies

 

and the first too

 

the first thing that can be seen, I mean, if you look out the window here at Bones, in the pre-dawn light 

 

The stylised cormorant in negative space, that you can't really see in the photo above has become a motif for me

 

and I began to see it as a symbol of the unfolding environmental maelstrom that lies ahead

 

Nature, in the shape of the cormorant, along with the subtleties of 'negative space', takes a nose dive into the ground

 

I was pleased enough with the subtleties of bird in space 

 

eat your heart out Brancusi

 

to build on the notion of 'ecology as stylised cormorant', and the piece below, Weather Vane Angel hangs at about 2 and a half meters, down the other dingle here, The Esgryn, that joins the Dulais Brook below the cabin  

Now I don't know what you've been told, but I've heard, and from the hardest of Hilly Billy Ranchers up here, that this spot, just below Bones Cabin, the confluence of The Esgryn and The Dulais Brook, is the place where the fairies play

 

There's a huge tradition of 'the little folk' in and around the dingle that guides the Dulais Brook toward the Wye, and it is, apparently, the last place to have had sight of the elfenfolk

 

The literature is a bit scanty, but there's general agreement that the fairies dance under foxgloves but are not adverse to a barn dance or two, and sightings 'within living memory' are documented as recently as 1912

I've seen fire flies down there, or 'back-lit' flies or gnats swarming in low summer sun, and the effect is ethereal, and adds to the magic where the sculptures maybe play with the fairies

The sculptures themselves are from found objects from here and about the cabin, or based on gifted bits and pieces from neighbours

 

Timber from felled oaks and metal from rusted gates, hurdles & bedsprings, old parts from derelict machines and tools are re-presented in the same landscape they were found

 

and, without wishing to sound like an idiot, I sometimes see them as 'playing hide and seek' with themselves and the landscape and twanging like a taunt guitar string, hinting at the evolution of the landscape and of our place in it

 

The piece itself, Weather vane Angel is on a swivel from one of those hanging basket chairs from the 70's and although it doesnt function as a weather vane, has a lovely subtlety about the way it turns and dances in a breeze or a gale 

 

I wanted something a bit more optimistic for this piece, as opposed to the nose dive piece I mean, and I hope it hints to the notion of the guardian angel. That the bird in space, this time, is being shepherded to safety, safe in the arms of the weather vane angel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golly gum drops!

The next two pieces are more straightforward

The Moon in a Boat, below, is also 'kinetic', or whatever the word is

the boat and the moon bit swivel independantly in the wind and is based on ancient myth

The Gods worried about the moon, especially when it went around the perilous underside of the earth, when the world was flat


Hermes, the Gods' messanger and all round 'good egg', was charged with its safe keeping, and, being a resourseful fellow, decided to put it in a boat, for safekeeping


I came to love this notion of the moon in a boat, along with the harmlessness of the strategy


The beautiful innocence of it all


A million miles away from firing rockets at it, or landing on it, or pretending to have landed on it

or whatever it is that they're doing to it now

The Moon in a Boat, on a yonic willow plinth, a homage


to the now seeming innocence of the ancients

 

 

 

 

 

I fibbed, maybe this next piece, Anti Totem, isn't straightforward, and maybe borrows from the sculptor David Smith's 'Medals for Dishonour', where each medal depicts a specific war-time evil

David Smith's Bombing Civilian Populations, for instance, refers to the devastation of the Spanish town of Guernica

Anti Totem references extinction

The traditional totem celebrates kinship groups, kinship groups between humans and between humans and nature and the spirit of nature
 

I wanted to paint 'Anti-totem' white, like they do with ghost bicycles on the continent, but time ran out, and me and my mate Andrew ended up hoofing the 6 metre monstrosity 'up' with no time to spare

The frost came as a gift. I really wouldn't have known how to paint it so beautifully

There's a couple of distressed birds and an egg at the top, a skelly belly fish in the middle, and a horned skull at the bottom

OK!

last piece now, and nice and straight forward too!


I did a couple of these for the last show, they're from the buttresses of large oaks that are about to be felled, the bit that flares out at the bottom that the foresters remove to get a lower cut on the trunk


The shapes for the birds occurred quite smoothly, suggested by the curves of the buttress itself and completing themselves without any drama


I was struggling for a title for them, musing to a friend, I like them I said, but I can't think of a title


They're blue, I continued


They're bird like


but what are they called?


Err, how about Bluebird, suggested my friend


aah, thank you, I smiled


Now why didn't I think of that?


Bluebird I and Bluebird II


So that was that. The tyranny of titles, sorted. Somethings gone right!

 

The sculptures are still here, mainly, but the snow's all gone


Anyone wishing to visit is very welcome by arrangement