Back on the sculpture photography trail

Today I got back to the voluntary photography project work I did pre-lockdown, for ArtUK. 

What a pleasure! I'd really missed it, during the hiatus that we've just had (partly for Covid reasons, and partly because of a temporary gap in funding).  Outdoor sculpture photography is fine within lockdown rules, providing it's not out of the local area and providing social distancing is observed.

The basic task is to record pieces of sculpture that are outdoors, in the public domain: on streets, in shopping malls etc, rather than in collections. 

So today Richard and I went off to Sheffield's East End, where I knew of a couple of pieces of work that I wanted to capture. In the process, my eye was also grabbed by one of the bits of steel industry heritage that are dotted around in that area.  These are majestic but now rather neglected items, standing as marooned reminders of past engineering glories.  Some are on dusty traffic islands, some - like this one - are in parks or sportsgrounds.

This one, I think, may be a Bessemer Converter.  Although it has been sited carefully on a small hill in part of the "Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park", there is no information panel or other source of insight about its origins and history. It's as if the original impulse to record the local industrial heritage got off to a bit of a start, but then ran into the sand. 

There's an extra which gives a bit more of a sense of the size of this enormous vessel, stranded as it now is,  in time and space...