Exhibition: The Elemental Sculpture Park, Cirencester (also study task 5)

This was definitely not your average sculpture park. The sculptures were dotted around a piece of wild land, not just amongst lakes and flowers but also dead trees, overgrown grass, small houses and plies of rocks. At first I was shocked by this and the fact that some of the sculptures were presented on top of badly piled breeze blocks. But after a while I actually got used to it as I began to see how it matched the spirit of the show. The show felt very light hearted and could be appreciated by almost anyone (important for a show visited mostly by locals) - not like your average serious prim and pristine sculpture park. The interplay between the sculptures and their surroundings was also really interesting and I liked that it was unclear what was and wasn't in the exhibition. This also worked well because all of the sculptures were for sale. Presenting them in this way showed the viewer how thy might be able to integrate them into their own garden.

My favourite thing was a series of maybe 70 odd sculptures constructed from old machinery, which were dotted about the land and the exhibition. They weren't part of the show and always live on the land. I loved the way in which they engaged with the land, as if they were a community of people living there, each doing a different activity. This creating of fictional characters and taking them out of constructed worlds/ seeing how they interact with the world around us is something which really interests me. I love its simple cleverness and I really admire illustrators like Jean Julien and Christoph Niemann who also do this in their work. I also think that the way in which the artist is able to create such a strong sense of character simply through the use of old machinery is what makes it so good. This is something that I have been starting to do within my own practice and would like to continue to explore. (my mountain man, my man in my 3D illustration, the men on the plant in editorial etc.)

However, there were a couple of sculptures that I was really unsure about, which looked to be quite conceptual. I think that presenting these amongst the other either comical pieces /bold sculptural forms was a little strange, especially within a space where it is unclear what is and isn't a part of the exhibition. They weren't really sculptures that would attract the same audience as the other garden sculptures and 90% of visitors would have walked straight past them. They would have been better off being exhibited in a gallery setting.