Heroes Not Zombies

I took a walk around the Jupiter Artland garden at Bonnington House last Saturday. Take a look……

In the gallery next to the ticket office amongst other exhibits there’s this

This is a collection of bottles of Bach flower remedies where each label has a vertical inscription of the name of the flower used to make the remedy and a haiku-like poem of one word per line, where each word contains one letter of the flower’s name. What an amazing piece of work! You can, if you want, buy a book of the poems. The work, by Alec Finlay, is called Mesostic Remedy and there are a pair of poems for each of the 38 flower remedies.

Once outside, the artland is a trail weaving through a wood. The day I was there it was raining intermittently but the forest was dense enough to stop me getting wet. The sound of the rain on the forest roof was beautiful.
The first work along the path is Suck, by Anish Kapoor

From here it looks like the cage is floating above the ground. Inside the cage is……

….a hole in the ground!

A little further on is Firmament by my favourite sculptor, Antony Gormley.

As you walk around and under it, it feels alive, like a giant iron shapeshifter!

Only connect, by Ian Hamilton Finlay is the first of three of his works.

Walking over this subtle little bridge flagged on each side by a simple stone plaque inscribed with the words “only connect”, you see, along the path, Andy Goldsworthy’s Stone House

Inside this pleasingly simple little dwelling is a rough rock floor

Next along the woodland path is easily the creepiest and most disturbing of all the works, Weeping Girls, by Laura Ford

Then the second and third of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s works, Temple of Apollo, and Xth Muse

The next work could well have been my favourite, Over Here, by Shane Waltener, a huge thread web spun between the trees…

It’s then a longer walk round to the edge of the forest which opens out onto Charles Jenks amazing earthworks, Life Mounds.

It took me two hours to walk around and take these photos, and as I was booked into the last session of the day, I had to leave then. I didn’t see everything and I wouldn’t mind going back again soon!

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