Blog
COBRA: more playground than early warning system
COBRA at the Grove
25/07/2025
Wandering around the gardens of the Grove Hotel on an out of season January afternoon, looking for a possible site for my sculpture, I was drawn to the curiously dismal playground. A dramatic gloom is cast by several soaring and splendid forest trees that loom over elderly relics of play equipment. There was something of Twin Peaks about the colourless arrangements of logs, rope and tyres. Over my several visits I have only once seen a child playing there, rocking forlornly on an ancient swing whose top bar pierces a massive sycamore while underneath two canoe-shaped cavities have been carved out by generations of swinging children.
There is also something theatrical about this Grove, an empty stage set waiting for the actors to gather, perhaps for a quarrelling gaggle of nymphs and shepherds or a duel between two swordsmen. Maybe back in time the Grove was the woody setting for bacchanalian and sacrifice. I was determined to have it for my sculpture because I find all the shapes beautifully composed in terms of size, large, and small scale, the pools of light and darkness, the varied textures of leaves, trunks, logs.
However there was one problem.This was to be my second outdoor sculpture –the first one was a towering Brutalist Crazy Golf commissioned for an exhibition called ‘Winter Sculpture Park 2025’ situated on an extraordinary wild wedge of scrubland in Dartford between the Thames estuary and Crossness pumping station. Unfortunately after six weeks and 3000 visitors vandals broke in and wrecked many of the sculptures. Mine was damaged by a grass fire and had parts wrenched off.
So though I would have preferred to place the sculpture in the centre of the Grove, I was too anxious about children climbing off it, drunks trying to squeeze through the holes et cetera hence it is cited where it is, in full view of the bar.
There was no artist fee for the Cromer Artspace exhibition in the Grove but luckily I been given an award by First Site Gallery in Colchester, whose Collectors Club funded me to work with a carpenter. I used this to learn how to construct really solid and lasting wooden sculptures. I chose a local carpenter Richard Gilbert, a self-proclaimed Philistine more used to making kitchen units and staircases. Richard was in turn amused and exasperated by my hippity hoppity process of bodging, but he never distracted me with aesthetic advice and showed me how to make a strong and permanent wooden structure.
I had been making 2-D forms that I thought of as flat sculptures, forms that I’d arrived at either through drawing or through random pattern making, cutting these out from ply and making them stand up somehow in installations. They were very fun and pleasing to me but prone to fall over. Also they couldn’t fully relate to whatever site they were in without all their 3 dimensions.
As for the design of the sculpture itself - when the opportunity came to make another large outdoor piece and. I saw the site I quickly decided as I wanted to make a hybrid of these two subjects, playgrounds and ordinance.
Unfortunately I had absolutely no idea what I wanted the sculpture to look like. My father had died in January and I found I had no creative energy left to imagine a new work. However, had been planning to work on convert my flat sculptures into pieces in the round and this project, combined with the carpentry funding from Firstsite seemed like a good solution.
I chose a piece from my solo exhibition last year at the Croatian Embassy in London which I’d designed in a modular way by moving paper shapes around, until a kind of uncomfortable harmony was reached. It looked like an impossible form to resolve into 3 D, as it that stood up on tiptoes on what looks like look like a large walking stick, but once Richard and I had made the different elements I could move them around till the sculpture bloomed into all its dimensions and looked interesting from every angle. The sculpture balances in one tiny point with its other ‘leg’ in the air, giving the heavy body a dancing look of instability. It does in fact respond to the touch with a gentle rocking motion.
The coastal site of the Grove had also suggested to me the various WW2 structures leftover from World War II around the Norfolk coast - concrete acoustic mirrors, iron binoculars on swivelling stands, pillboxes. I wanted to make the object’s bulky pillbox silhouette hint at these fears of invasion and threat, fusing play and wariness.
The colours I chose also reflect the site - the dirty lemon yellow is taken from the swing, the military green from the trees and the pink is the colour of the skin of my palms. It took coats and coats of paint to get the sour yellow as unpleasant as the piece needed.
The overall paint scheme of the sculpture is more like flat form of sculpture. To get the design I simply traced around the elements and shifted them slightly along to the right, drawing round them so that the ‘skin’ of the painting lies slightly to one side of the structure as though slipping from it. This trick of painting also contributes to the sense of wobble.
I would like to think that some of you have imagined putting an arm through one of the holes or sitting astride the top of the sculpture and rocking it like a pony! This visual imagining is known as Affordance, a term taken from Cognitive Psychology that describes what an object offers the viewer to imply how it is to be used - a handle for fingers, a seat for bottoms.
So COBRA is a hybrid which appears to offer these uses but ultimately like all art it is, in the words of the Russian literary critic Viktor Shkklovsky, ‘an object that is made to be unfamiliar, to be a difficult form, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself.’
There is also something theatrical about this Grove, an empty stage set waiting for the actors to gather, perhaps for a quarrelling gaggle of nymphs and shepherds or a duel between two swordsmen. Maybe back in time the Grove was the woody setting for bacchanalian and sacrifice. I was determined to have it for my sculpture because I find all the shapes beautifully composed in terms of size, large, and small scale, the pools of light and darkness, the varied textures of leaves, trunks, logs.
However there was one problem.This was to be my second outdoor sculpture –the first one was a towering Brutalist Crazy Golf commissioned for an exhibition called ‘Winter Sculpture Park 2025’ situated on an extraordinary wild wedge of scrubland in Dartford between the Thames estuary and Crossness pumping station. Unfortunately after six weeks and 3000 visitors vandals broke in and wrecked many of the sculptures. Mine was damaged by a grass fire and had parts wrenched off.
So though I would have preferred to place the sculpture in the centre of the Grove, I was too anxious about children climbing off it, drunks trying to squeeze through the holes et cetera hence it is cited where it is, in full view of the bar.
There was no artist fee for the Cromer Artspace exhibition in the Grove but luckily I been given an award by First Site Gallery in Colchester, whose Collectors Club funded me to work with a carpenter. I used this to learn how to construct really solid and lasting wooden sculptures. I chose a local carpenter Richard Gilbert, a self-proclaimed Philistine more used to making kitchen units and staircases. Richard was in turn amused and exasperated by my hippity hoppity process of bodging, but he never distracted me with aesthetic advice and showed me how to make a strong and permanent wooden structure.
I had been making 2-D forms that I thought of as flat sculptures, forms that I’d arrived at either through drawing or through random pattern making, cutting these out from ply and making them stand up somehow in installations. They were very fun and pleasing to me but prone to fall over. Also they couldn’t fully relate to whatever site they were in without all their 3 dimensions.
As for the design of the sculpture itself - when the opportunity came to make another large outdoor piece and. I saw the site I quickly decided as I wanted to make a hybrid of these two subjects, playgrounds and ordinance.
Unfortunately I had absolutely no idea what I wanted the sculpture to look like. My father had died in January and I found I had no creative energy left to imagine a new work. However, had been planning to work on convert my flat sculptures into pieces in the round and this project, combined with the carpentry funding from Firstsite seemed like a good solution.
I chose a piece from my solo exhibition last year at the Croatian Embassy in London which I’d designed in a modular way by moving paper shapes around, until a kind of uncomfortable harmony was reached. It looked like an impossible form to resolve into 3 D, as it that stood up on tiptoes on what looks like look like a large walking stick, but once Richard and I had made the different elements I could move them around till the sculpture bloomed into all its dimensions and looked interesting from every angle. The sculpture balances in one tiny point with its other ‘leg’ in the air, giving the heavy body a dancing look of instability. It does in fact respond to the touch with a gentle rocking motion.
The coastal site of the Grove had also suggested to me the various WW2 structures leftover from World War II around the Norfolk coast - concrete acoustic mirrors, iron binoculars on swivelling stands, pillboxes. I wanted to make the object’s bulky pillbox silhouette hint at these fears of invasion and threat, fusing play and wariness.
The colours I chose also reflect the site - the dirty lemon yellow is taken from the swing, the military green from the trees and the pink is the colour of the skin of my palms. It took coats and coats of paint to get the sour yellow as unpleasant as the piece needed.
The overall paint scheme of the sculpture is more like flat form of sculpture. To get the design I simply traced around the elements and shifted them slightly along to the right, drawing round them so that the ‘skin’ of the painting lies slightly to one side of the structure as though slipping from it. This trick of painting also contributes to the sense of wobble.
I would like to think that some of you have imagined putting an arm through one of the holes or sitting astride the top of the sculpture and rocking it like a pony! This visual imagining is known as Affordance, a term taken from Cognitive Psychology that describes what an object offers the viewer to imply how it is to be used - a handle for fingers, a seat for bottoms.
So COBRA is a hybrid which appears to offer these uses but ultimately like all art it is, in the words of the Russian literary critic Viktor Shkklovsky, ‘an object that is made to be unfamiliar, to be a difficult form, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself.’
