As I write, the sun is shining and the view from my window suggests that spring has finally arrived – the daffodils are dancing, the birds are busying and the trees are budding. The grass also needs cutting. Cue a sudden urgency to update my website.
The upturn in the weather has brought back memories of a sweltering summer day at the Shoreham Sculpture Trail in June last year. As well as being a gift for alliterative blog post headings, it was a visual feast.
This wasn’t your average village affair to raise funds for repairs to the local church, even though that was the ultimate aim. No, this was an ambitious art trail featuring 80 or so members of the London Group – a long-established group of artists whose founder members included the 19th-century painter and printmaker Samuel Palmer, a one-time resident of the pretty Kent village in the Darent Valley.
From interventions with the landscape, such as pearl-encrusted spiders’ webs, strings of ice-cream cones and coloured thread winding through and around trees, to incongruous creatures such as a group of shuttlecock-and-cable jellyfish and a patchwork figure apparently disembowelling itself on a neatly manicured lawn, the work was diverse, surprising and thought-provoking. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and an eye on the London Group website for any news of a repeat performance this year.
Terry Barber 