New gate

I have been upgrading a rather neglected part of my garden. I have made a new flower bed and made the gate from some bits of scrap iron in the skip outside a company. My garden will be open for the Wylye Valley Art Trail in Wiltshire from May 28th to June 5th 2011. By then the plants will have sprouted. A lady faces a unicorn. According to mediaeval legend unicorns were very fond of ladies.

More sculptures for Horseworld Sculpture Show

Busy building up Horseworld Sculpture Exhibition at Horseworld horse and donkey sanctuary near Bristol. Above one of the jigsaw bits - about a metre wide - painted on a sponge mattress by Andrew De Friesz, evoking the cave paintings of Lascaux. They are scattered round this patch of thornbush. The effect is similar to picking out cave paintings in the dark. Andy uses unconventional materials. A former chef at the Ritz, he made a corset for the couturier Jean Paul Gaultier out of biscuits. Below my Lady and the Unicorn, made from recycled bits and pieces and covered with granules of recycled glass. In mediaeval mythology unicorns were very fond of ladies and they were often depicted together, most famously in the tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris. The Chinese believed unicorns were brightly coloured - I don't know about bright blue but that's artistic licence. The lady was a mannequin off a skip.

Unicorn

I finished my Unicorn. It stands about a metre and a half high. I made the armature from odds and ends including a bit of a lawn mower and the bottom of an old bath tub, the latter providing a stable base. I used tennis balls for the eyes. The covering is granules of silver granite donated by the generous firm of Sureset which makes permeable resin paving. The red of eyes is basalt and the black is copper slag from the same source. The Unicorn will be accompanied by a Lady as in the tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris. They will be in the Horseworld Sculture Exhibition at Horseworld horse sanctuary near Bristol which I am curating - on from May 23rd to November 1st.