Cornelia Parker’s Folkestone Mermaid modelled by local mum Georgina Baker
By Jeremy Miles
I receved a message from my friend the Folkestone Mermaid today. I say ‘my friend’ but if truth be told we’ve never actually met. She just feels like a friend and as a stalwart champion of my old home town, seems to support all the right concerns for its future.
Georgina Baker, a Folkestone mum of two, was the model chosen by Cornelia Parker to fulfil a commission for the town’s second Arts Triennial back in 2011.
Cast in lifesize bronze but in Mermaid form she has now sat at the end of The Stade on a granite boulder beside the fishermen’s harbour wall keeping a watchful eye on the ever-changing seascape and out towards the horizon for the past 13 years.
Originally conceived as a reinterpretation of Copenhagen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ and inspired by HG Wells’ story of The Sea Lady and Hans Christian Anderson’s famous fairy tale, Parker decided that rather than a literal copy of the Copenhagen Mermaid she wanted to base the work on a real person.
She invited local residents to apply and Baker was chosen from a shortlist of six. It was a good choice. Not only has the Folkestone Mermaid become a noted feature of the town loved by residents and visitors alike, but Georgina Baker has taken her duties extremely seriously. She now sees herself as a kind of custodian of the history, heritage and traditions of Folkestone and particularly the harbour area. Hence her message earlier today which regards the controversial development plans for massive blocks of residential flats extending along the seafront to the Harbour Arm.
In a Block the Blocks message she urges us to protest further over the size, design and location of the monstrous plan and encourages people to add more signatures to the petition that she started last year.
Many of us have already lodged complaints over the hideously inappropriate size, design and location of the project and Georgina’s message alerted us to a new planning application seeking imminent approval of existing details. I did not take much persuading.
These flats which have already been described as looking like something out of the Flintstones are simply wrong. To build them on the harbour site would visually destroy the character of the area and swamp it with a wholly over-intensive influx of residents. It would drive business away from the town centre and clog the seafront with traffic. It would look horrible and be a disaster.
As someone who was born and brought up in Folkestone and into a well-known family with local links dating back more than 200 years, this is important to me. Even though I haven’t lived there for nearly four decades, I worked in the town, got married there and had ancestors in the fishing community who helped man the local lifeboat and others who were customs officers and even possible smugglers. I have continued to visit Folkestone regularly. I care deeply for it and think that most of the developments that have seen it evolve into one of the most popular seaside locations on the south coast have been wonderful but these flats are a step too far and risk undoing all the good that has been achieved so far.
The late sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink in her beloved Dorset landscape
By Jeremy Miles
Dorset wasn’t just home to the late celebrated sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink, it was a place of refuge and inspiration, providing the perfect environment for both work and play. She spent the final 16 years of her life in the county creating powerful, groundbreaking art and entertaining visiting friends at her beautiful country estate, Woolland House near Blandford Forum.
After many years living in France and London, the increasingly famous and successful Frink and her third husband Alex Csáky, discovered Woolland in the mid-1970s and instantly knew that they had found a country base in a wonderful location that offered all that they required.
Nestling beneath Bulbarrow Hill on the edge of the Blackmore Vale and in an area of outstanding natural beauty, the house and its grounds were a haven of tranquillity surrounded by spectacular views across the ancient Dorset landscape. It provided an inspirational location for Frink’s studio that wasn’t too remote from the London art world or the foundries that cast her often giant bronze sculptures.
Photograph by Hattie Miles … Elisabeth Frink “A View From Within” exhibition at Dorset Museum, Dorchester. View of the exhibition. left, Gogglehead 1969 courtesy of The Ingram Collection of Modern Art, centre Seated Man courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.
Frink had trained at Chelsea School of Art in the 1950s and found early fame with her massive male figures and naturalistic sculptures of horses and dogs. She would go on to become one of the towering figures of British art driven by a sense of compassion and known for an unwavering interest in the nature of man and the laws of the natural world. She was elected as a Royal Academician in 1977 and appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1982.
Today she is best known for her public sculptures which can be seen in a diverse array of locations nationally and internationally including Salisbury, Coventry and Liverpool cathedrals and of course much closer to home, like her Dorset Martyrs Memorial at South Walks, Dorchester, which stands on the site of the gallows where Catholic martyrs were hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries.
But there were many smaller studio works too, including both sculptures and prints and by the time she moved to Dorset there were increasing demands on her time and she needed space and a creative environment to continue developing her art.
Two of the Frink exhibits at Dorchester
Woolland soon became the focus of not only Frink’s intense and disciplined work schedule but also a joyous place for her and Alex to invite their wide circle of friends for fun weekends and long happy meals. Above all it felt like home and in a way it always had been. For although Elisabeth Frink was born in Suffolk in 1930, she had first found Dorset during the Second World War when her Army officer father was posted to the county and her family temporarily moved to the Purbeck village of Kingston.
She was just 11 years old but memories of discovering the area and places like Kimmeridge, Dancing Ledge and Corfe Castle remained with her, helping to establish her singular artistic style. Moving to Woolland allowed her to find the place that she felt was her true spiritual home. Her life there with Alex was intensely happy and productive but sadly cut short when they were both stricken by illness and died within weeks of each other in 2003.
Frink was just 63 years old when she died but her artistic legacy lives on. She had long let it be known that she wanted the county to be the permanent home of her considerable archive.
Dame Elisabeth Frink at work in the studio
Thanks to her estate many of her works are held by the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester and now, 30 years after her death, it is staging the first-ever exhibition dedicated to her time living and working at Woolland.
Elisabeth Frink: A View from Within runs until April and showcases more than 80 of her sculptures, drawings and prints including working plasters that informed her final bronze sculptures that have never been on public display before.
The show examines her working processes, recreating part of her Dorset studio with a collection of her tools and the plasters that formed the basis of some of her best-known bronze sculptures. It displays many quintessential Frink works like Seated Man, Goggle Heads, Walking Madonna, The Dorset Martyrs and there’s even her wonderful maquette for Risen Christ, the piece that turned out to be her final commission.
The inclusion of the work in the show underlines the fact that despite suffering from the cancer that would kill her, this determined and brilliant woman worked right up until the end of the end of her life. The completed work which today towers over the western doors of Liverpool Cathedral was unveiled just days before her death.
As well as revealing something of both Frink’s artistic practices and her joy of life, this is a fascinating exhibition that gives visitors the chance to explore the importance of her years in Dorset through both her art and a selection of personal possessions, including letters and photographs.
Dame Elisabeth Frink with her third husband Alex Csaky c1976. Frink archive Courtesy of Dorset History Centre.
Although relatively compact, this is an important show that has been beautifully designed by its co-curators Annette Ratuszniak and Lucy Johnston. With carefully selected lighting that particularly highlights the unique carving of Frink’s bronzes, it has a thematic layout that takes the visitor through sections dedicated to Family and Social Life, Printmaking, Spirituality and Humanism, Interdependence of Species, Human Rights and New Beginnings.
One intriguing addition to the exhibition is Small Warrior – the 12-inch tall bronze sculpture bought for £90 at a car-boot sale in Essex. The piece was recently the subject of BBC1’s Fake or Fortune? Was it the real deal or just a relatively worthless hunk of metal? For a while the jury was out but after exhaustive scientific tests and expert analysis it was declared to be a genuine rediscovery of a lost Frink original from the 1950s which could be worth £60,000.
*Elisabeth Frink: A View From Within runs at the Dorset Museum and Art Gallery in High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA until 21st April 2024. Further information at http://www.dorsetmuseum.org
*This piece was originally published in the January 2024 edition of Dorset magazine.
Sven and Julia Berlin , a pair of bohemians from anothert age.
By Jeremy Miles
A sad letter arrived the other day telling us that Julia Berlin, the lovely widow of my old friend the artist and writer Sven Berlin, died last summer. It came from a firm of solicitors in Penzance who had found our last Christmas card to her while preparing to wrap up the Berlin estate.
I felt guilty and shocked that we had no idea that Julia was no longer with us but I suppose that was the nature of our relationship. Since Sven’s death in 1999 we exchanged annual Christmas cards with her and occasionally visited the little cottage outside Wimborne that they had shared but we would often go months without making contact.
Lockdown and the covid restrictions made things more difficult and when there was no card from Julia last Christmas it seemed like just one of those things. We now of course know that there will be no more fascinating and fun chats over tea but we will always treasure memories of their friendship.
Sven and Julia really were an extraordinary couple, a pair of bohemians from another age. She was his third wife and 33 years his junior. They turned heads with their unconventional lifestyle, colourful clothes and free-living attitudes.
By the time they arrived in Wimborne in the mid-1970s, Sven was already both famous and controversial as a writer, painter and sculptor. A leading and sometimes mercurial figure in the immediate pre and post-war art world of St Ives in Cornwall, he made many friends but also rather too many enemies, There were clashes with some big egos, not least those artistic king-pins of the era, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
Sven Berlin
Years later he would speak with enormous fondness of his time in St Ives and his friendship with painters like Bryan Wynter and John Wells. But he also expressed sadness and anger about his clashes with small-town busy-bodies and the powerful and controlling presence of Nicholson and Hepworth.
These irritants and Sven’s uncompromising and stubborn nature would eventually lead to a devastating fall from grace when he decided to vent his spleen in a book. The Dark Monarch was a barely fictionalised account of the reasons why, after establishing himself as one of the town’s leading lights back in the 1940s, he was finally driven away by those he viewed as small-minded and mean-spirited. It reinvented St Ives as ‘Cuckoo Town’ where no one could live without “being gutted like a herring and spread out in the sun…for all to see.”
Originally published in 1962, The Dark Monarch was withdrawn from circulation within weeks of publication amid a hail of writs. Little had been done to disguise the identity of the characters. For instance, the poet Arthur Caddick was presented as Eldred Haddock. Several of those involved were so outraged by their portrayal that they took legal action. Sven refused to make even minor changes. It cost him a small fortune. He was left, in his own inimitable words: “bleeding from every pocket”.
Ironically The Dark Monarch would, with the passage of time, also be the focus of the major exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2010 that finally, a decade after his death, showed that Sven Berlin would always be regarded as a key figure in the history of the famous Cornish art colony.
With all the main litigants dead and special permission from Julia, they even republished the book complete with Sven’s original secret key to exactly who was who.
Just one part of GIANT – the new 15,000 square foot gallery in the centre of Bournemouth
It is no coincidence that the opening exhibition at Bournemouth’s huge new contemporary art gallery is called Big Medicine. The town centre is ailing and badly needs a shot in its metaphorical arm.
The 15,000 square foot privately-funded gallery, called appropriately enough GIANT, covers the entirety of the second floor of the old Debenham’s building in The Square. It is part of a much needed plan to inject some life, creativity and culture back into the badly run-down shopping centre.
Big Medicine, which opened last night, does the job admirably. Curated by Bournemouth artist Stuart Semple, the exhibition and the GIANT gallery space is part of the first phase of a project that will see the old building reborn as Bobby’s which was for many years a much-loved and historic retail landmark in the town
One of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s suicide vests
The free show features the work of major international artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jim Lambie, Gavin Turk, Gary Card, Nicky Carvell, Paola Ciarska, Eva Cremers, Chad Person, Anthony Rodinone and Paul Trefry.
Not only are the works truly thought-provoking, like the Chapman brothers suicide vests cast in bronze and sometimes loaded with art materials but the whole exhibition is world-class. How wonderful that it has been brought to Bournemouth a town that has so much going for it but in recent years has been branded “a cultural desert”.
Meanwhile the GIANT gallery also has a dedicated Project Space which is featuring Why We Shout – the Art of Protest. Curated by Lee Cavaliere, director of VOMA, the world’s first virtual museum in association with Greenpeace, it examines ways in which contemporary artists respond and contribute to protest and activism.
With works by Banksy, US feminist Martha Rosler, Turner-Prize winner Jeremy Deller, Hong Kong activist-artist Kacey Wong, trans photographer Bex Wade and others it covers climate change, environmental struggles, the illegal rave scene of the 90s, LGBTQ + issues and much more.
Two huge Harris Hawks outside sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood’s Hampshire home
Here’s another one I did earlier. Well several years back actually. Probably around 2012. It was written for the now long-gone Compass Magazine and offered an intriguing insight into the curious world of New Forest sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood. Thought it was worth revisiting.
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By Jeremy Miles
Internationally renowned wildlife sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood is an anomaly in an art world full of pretensions and psycho-babble. His works – stunning sculptures of birds – sell across the world, often for tens of thousands of pounds, yet he would rather have teeth pulled than have to play the gallery game. He prefers to work remotely at his home deep in the Hampshire countryside outside Ringwood. Perched on the edge of an escarpment with views for 30 miles across Hampshire and Dorset, it’s an otherworldly place.
Surrounded by monumental bronze sculptures – a one-and-half ton,12 foot tall Peregrine falcon dominates the entrance – the Dashwood home is a marvel to behold. As you walk across the lawn there are are two huge Harris hawks, a barn owl, a tern, a great crested grebe and a frog. A massive Mandarin drake sits on a plinth in the middle of a pond: “We built the pond for the sculpture rather than the other way around,” says the 66-year-old artist matter-of-factly.
Nestling amidst ancient forest, the natural setting of this house is astonishing too. He points to a huge gnarled old oak which is believed to be 700 years old. “Incredible to think that that was an acorn in about 1300,” he says.
The site is even believed to have been used for beacons warning of the approach of the Spanish Armada. Dashwood has lived there with his wife Val and three sons Leo, Max and James for 17 years. He says he really can’t imagine being anywhere else.
Despite his international reputation and prices that range from £2,000 to £250,000, he eschews most private views and even tries to avoid discussing works with potential buyers. “I’m a rebellious old sod,”he told me as we looked around the huge studio and home gallery that he has built in a barn just yards from his front door. Sucking on a liquorice paper roll-up and swearing like a proverbial trooper, he warmed to his theme. “I don’t do commissions because to be honest I am too awkward and bloody-minded. They all too often end in tears because the person commissioning the piece and the artist have a different idea about the end result. So it’s very, very simple. I just do exactly what I want to do and then offer the work for sale.”
Chippy and uncompromising he may be but Geoffrey Dashwood’s prickly exterior clearly masks a sensitive soul who deeply cares that his work is an honest response to the natural world that he loves. Hampshire born and bred, he has a rare affinity with the New Forest and in his youth worked there as a keeper. Although he won a scholarship to art school in Southampton when he was just 15-years-old, he dropped out within weeks. “I hated it,” he says. The Forestry Commission provided the only job he could hang onto. “Basically I‘m absolutely unemployable,” he explains.
Doing artwork for forestry brochures provided some personal satisfaction. He seized the moment and left to go freelance. Amazingly Dashwood didn’t turn to sculpture until he was in his mid 30s. He modelled a tiny English partridge and loved the whole process. With a £5,000 loan from the kind of bank manager that doesn’t exist anymore he made a series of bronze castings and touted his work around upmarket outlets in London – Harrods, Aspreys, Garrards and the galleries of Cork Street.
Thinking about it now he says he’s amazed that he had the nerve to walk into such elitist emporiums and demand to see the bronze buyer. Somehow it paid off. He was on his way. Initially he concentrated on miniatures but then moved on to life-size and monumental sculptures. The one-man shows and international reputation soon followed.
He has successfully experimented with abstracting the fine detail of the birds down to studies of pure sculptural form. He has also explored the effects that can be achieved with multi-coloured patinas. He recalls eyebrows being raised when he asked at the foundry that he used what would happen if he splattered a mixture of all three commonly used chemicals – liver sulphate, ferric nitrate and cupric nitrate – on his bronzes.
“They were horrified. They said ‘You can’t do that’ and I just said ‘Oh yeah, and where’s the book that says I can’t?’ We went ahead and it was brilliant. It’s incredible that no one had ever done that before, but that’s the conservatism of the art world for you.”
He knows he’s been lucky, gaining a rare reputation and enjoying success despite a stubborn refusal to bend to the whims of either clients or art professionals.
“I’ve had a very self-indulgent life,” says Dashwood. “The extraordinary thing is that logically choosing to do this kind of sculpture should have involved a compromise between what I want to do and what the market price demands. I discovered that the more self-indulgent I became the more the market would rise to it.”
I’m sitting in a suburban garden in Bournemouth talking to the man who created the Grange Hill flying sausage. The banger, which appeared in the comic book style title credits of the long- running TV school drama, has followed artist and illustrator Bob Cosford for more than 40 years.
He shrugs: “That title sequence will without a doubt be what I’m remembered for,” he tells me. And here we have the fundamental artist’s dilemma. Create anything that really captures the public’s imagination and it will stick. To this day you can buy a Grange Hill sausage mug, poster, even a t-shirt. But it was creating this iconic title sequences that set Bob on his professional path.
Joining the BBC straight from Art College in the early 1970s, Bob was soon on a path that would bring him a shed-load of awards and critical acclaim. He was nominated for a BAFTA, worked on TV dramas like Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven and a raft of popular television series in the 1980s that included Nanny starring Wendy Craig, Bird of Prey with Richard Griffith, and Angels which was dubbed the Z-Cars of nursing.
He worked as a graphic designer and spent many years around Camden and Soho as a creative director for film and TV and ad agencies. It’s an impressive CV but that famous ‘flying sausage’ invariably comes up again and again. Bob is philosophical and recently told fan site Grange Hill Gold that he’s not only proud of the sausage but very flattered that his work has been so well received. “I’ve never actually seen an episode of Grange Hill,” he confesses to me. “The titles were for the first series ever made and the programme went out at 4.50pm, so I would have either been working or down the pub at that time.”
We went back to the old home town for the 60th birthday party of a young friend at the weekend. There were lots of reminders of why I love Folkestone. I was born and brought up in the town, went to school there, met and married Hattie there and cut my journalistic teeth on the local newspaper. Though we’ve returned many times since we haven’t actually lived in Folkestone for more than 30 years. It is full of good memories though, particularly of the local arts scene. Inevitably I suppose most of the writers, artists, musicians and actors I used to know have moved on but great to find the old place still full of character and artistic energy. Continue reading “A town transformed by art”
Picturesque New Quay the town where Dylan Thomas wrote the first draft of Under Milk Wood
I am standing outside one of Dylan Thomas’s favourite pubs in a “cliff-perched toppling town” on the west coast of Wales. It is true that many a hostelry claims the notoriously thirsty Welsh poet as a regular. But this is New Quay, the picturesque fishing village on Cardigan Bay that Dylan often visited as a child. He and his wife Caitlin also made it their home and writing-base for a year during the Second World War.
A Dorset Landscape by Leslie Moffat Ward (1930) All images: Russell-Cotes Gallery & Museum
By Jeremy Miles
When Victorian art collector Sir Merton Russell-Cotes bequeathed his lavish cliff-top home, East Cliff Hall, and its huge collection of paintings and sculptures to the people of Bournemouth he created an intriguing problem. He was a fearfully hard act to follow. The collection that he and his wife Annie had spent decades acquiring was idiosyncratic and wide-ranging. Magnificent paintings shared wall space with those that were considered minor and mediocre, but somehow it all worked. It was a collection that reflected Sir Merton’s flamboyant style and generosity of spirit.
Arthur Bradbury’s 1935 painting Pamela
But it also highlighted the fact that he had been a man of his age, born into the era of Empire. By the time of his death in 1921 the contemporary art world had moved on. Post First World War sensibilities were open to radical change and though public taste, as ever, lagged a few years behind the artistic vanguard, eventually the inevitable happened and Victorian art fell seriously out of fashion.
However Bournemouth was sitting on what was effectively a priceless time-capsule and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum collection is now recognised as one of the finest complete Victorian collections in the world. That it is housed in its original home is a major bonus. Unfortunately none of this helped answer the problem of how to add to and develop the collection. The answer is found in Meeting Modernism: 20th Century Art in the Russell-Cotes Collection which runs at the museum’s galleries until 24th April.
