Domain (Prototypes No’s 2 and 3)

To Arley Gardens this morning. The White Cube Gallery at Bermondsey has its first open air sculpture exhibition there. And I wanted to get some perennials from the nursery.

Quite a few of the sculptures left me cold, to be honest. The ones I liked nearly all had some foundation in the form of the human body. So I liked the pieces by Tracy Emin and David Altmejd, and these by Anthony Gormley.

The title was puzzling whilst I was there, but a bit of research makes sense of it. Domain was a major sculptural exhibition at the Baltic in Newcastle in 2003. Over 200 local people aged between 2 and 80 were covered head to toe in plaster (it looks an uncomfortable process), which then acted as a frame to create human figures (domains) using steel rods welded together. The figures were then assembled in one very large room which people could wander through. So these must be prototypes to prove the process works.

Whatever, so far as the blackbird is concerned it’s been gifted an excellent singing perch atop the garden walls.

NB I have combined two images, these figures are a little distance from each other, albeit atop the same wall.