The Gormley (Monday 19th October 2015)

There are five sculptures by Sir Antony Gormley dotted around the country to celebrate 50 years of the Landmark Trust at the moment (they will disappear from the landscape in May 2016). Coffee Potter blipped one on the Stratford Canal recently and mentioned that one of the others was in Dorset, at Kimmeridge Bay.

My brother, The Spotlight Kid, lives not far from there and so we arranged to visit it from his home. The day before I learned that in mid-September a violent storm had toppled the structure onto the rocks and that it was now lying in a horizontal position, partially submerged at high tide. Undeterred, we decided to go and see it in its altered state. Gormley was apparently delighted at its interaction with nature, especially as reports seemed to suggest the sculpture had escaped much damage.

It was a fine afternoon and we enjoyed exploring the coastline on the cliff-top coast path and at the beach, and saw some interesting birds and flora, but could not find the Gormley, supposedly below Clavell Tower, a folly built in 1830 but moved to its current position by the Landmark Trust after 2002 to prevent it from crumbling off the cliff into the sea.

The closest we could get to seeing it was this fine painting on one of the boulders on the beach that showed the Gormley before it met its nemesis.

We did see a strange structure nearby that could have been at the spot where the statue had been, holding a stone that could have been the plinth that held the statue (as shown in the Extra). I later learned that the sandbags visible beside the structure in fact encased the statue and had been placed there to protect it, so I had, without realizing it, photographed all that there was to see of the Gormley.

L.
27.10.2015 (1513 hr)

Blip #1689 (#1939 including archived blips)
Consecutive Blip #004
Day #2036
LOTD #923 (#1044 including archived blips)

A Day At Kimmeridge Bay, 19 October 2015 (Flickr album)

Lens for Blip: Pentax HD P-DA 55-300mm F4-5.8 ED WR

Seaside series
Dorset series
Art series

Gormley Statue Downfall (Daily Mail, 28 September 2015)
Clavell Tower (Landmark Trust page)

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Julia Kent - Invitation To The Voyage (2015)
I won't go into the mishap that befell me on the journey to Dorchester but my journey was otherwise enlivened by Gilles Peterson's musical choices. He was sitting in for Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music and included this piece by the Canadian (based in New York NY) cellist and composer Julia Kent, from her new album Asperities, about which she has said, "I was thinking about the concept of difficulty. Whether in life or in nature - of conflict, of being troubled. The idea of friction. Also in geology, an asperity is some part of a fault-line that doesn’t move which can create an earthquake, which is quite an evocative concept… In the music there is an inherent sense of dissonance; that things are too close for comfort. More generally, it seems like a particularly dark time in the world right now, and I think that definitely had an influence too".

One year ago:
Bowood 2014 #39