Press Releases
| Public Sculpture goes Underground at the Irene Mall
In one of his biggest projects to date, Angus Taylor, together with fellow artists and assistants from Dionysus Sculpture Works (DSW), has just completed the construction and installation of a number of monumental public sculptures at the new Irene Mall. Irene, until fairly recently, managed to avoid being absorbed into the urban sprawl of nearby Pretoria and succeeded in retaining a rural atmosphere by virtue of its open fields and rolling hills dotted with low-output dairy farms and small-holdings. This began to change about ten years ago when the lushness of the area, coupled with its highly desirable proximity to the city, made it too attractive a prospect for property developers to resist and upmarket gated estates soon began to pop up. Inevitably, this sudden population expansion created the need for…you guessed it, a shopping mall. But the Irene Mall takes the model of the quintessential South African shopping mall and turns it on its head, especially in terms of its unique approach to space. Rabbit-warren indoor corridors, artificial light and stale processed air are eschewed in favour of a number of core buildings – seemingly randomly erected – loosely communicating with one another by means of public piazzas. The open-plan nature of the complex works to invite shoppers into the various stores, while the spaces between foster a sense of market squares of yesteryear. Both are in keeping with the fondly held notion of Irene as a close-knit community. Our understanding of public sculpture in this country is more often than not clouded by the perception that the piece should venerate a once celebrated (now often reviled) personality or a brave deed. Public sculpture is therefore expected to be imbued with a sense of solemnity and reverence. Not so the sculptures at the Mall which instead elevate the banal and seek to introduce an element of playfulness and fun. Perhaps the most quirky of the three sculptures at the Mall is The Udder Side, which Taylor conceptualised and produced in collaboration with Francois Visser and Steven Delport. As can be surmised from the title, the piece is an affectionate send-up of the dairy cow – the unofficial symbol of Irene. When DSW became involved in this project Taylor was pleasantly surprised to find that the developers were not fixated on inauthentic themes and architectural styles (think Tuscan oddities blotting the Highveld landscape) but wanted instead to explore local ideas and histories – hence the cow. But since cows had already made their debut in the world of art in the form of the colourful fibreglass cows that flooded Swiss cities in the first “Cow Parades” in the 1990s, and were soon adopted worldwide in various fundraising initiatives – something a little more ‘off the wall’ was sought. And I suppose one doesn’t get much more ‘off the wall’ than to submerge a hugely oversized cow beneath the piazza floor with only its four legs and udder left visible! (By the way, the rumour that the rest of the cow is visible from the basement below is sadly not true.) DSW realised that The Udder Side would inevitably be a magnet for children and planned the construction of the piece accordingly. A small-scale model made from clay perfected shape and proportions and this was then up-scaled using a custom DSW-built laser system. The final udder and legs, which stand more than six meters high, were then cast, in sections, from reinforced concrete. Legs and udder were topped with cast-bronze hooves and teats to complete the effect. Surfaces were pigmented and smoothed to resemble the animal’s skin and also to allow children to slide and slither all over the structure without fear of harm. As an added precaution, Taylor and his team departed momentarily from their usual meticulous attention to proportion and widened the gaps between udder and legs slightly in order to avoid any danger of a child’s limb being trapped if the child should fall off the structure. Staying with the cow theme is Triksie, a gigantic 6 by 4 by 3.5 meter grass sculpture that guards the main entrance to the Mall. For this work Taylor worked closely with landscape architect Francois Theron, with the help of DSW team Eric Manganye & Vusi Rambuda, to construct an internal galvanised steel frame. The frame, intended to articulate the whole form, was then filled with growth medium and the whole covered with a porous nylon cloth into which ground-cover and grass seedlings were inserted. The entire structure is criss-crossed with irrigation tubes designed to keep the covering green and luxuriant. Triksie obviously takes its cue from Jeff Koons’ 1992 sculpture Puppy – a gigantic cartoon puppy shape constructed entirely from flowering annuals, but unlike Koons’ work, Taylor’s is perennial and makes deliberate reference to the indigenous flora of the area. On a less pastoral note is Apollonian – Dionysian, two squatting, cast-steel figures with a board game between them. Of the three, this sculpture is the most traditional in approach. Two similar, slightly larger-than-life-sized male figures were modelled in clay over a steel armature and the clay was then allowed to dry to the point that it cracked away from the armature in places. The resultant imperfect forms were cast in steel and stainless steel respectively and both display a polished metal surface detail that not only links them together, but also makes reference to Guy Du Toit’s – another renowned artist involved in the public sculpture project at the Mall – works. Taylor says of this work that he wanted the appearance of the sculptures to refer to an African tradition in which the body shape is kept relatively simple and stylised but surface decoration is dramatised by the addition of symbolic shapes and objects. The work is situated next to an outside restaurant and lends an informal air to the setting. Western and African histories seem to merge in the common act of playing a board game. Irene Mall has broken new ground in a number of key areas. It is one of the few developments in South Africa in which a generous budget for public art was factored in at the outset. The developers have avoided sheep mentality and have designed a complex that takes full advantage of our glorious climate. And perhaps most importantly, the developers have trusted Taylor sufficiently to allow him the freedom to create playful and interactive works that thumb their noses at old-time public sculpture and are a joy to adults and children alike. And well-placed trust is was indeed since Taylor has just heard that he is one of the nominees for the Visi Designer of the Year award for 2008! |
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Some Cow Facts
- 1,200 construction workers built the shopping centre.
- The Tower and its water reservoir is a new landmark in Irene.
- The centre has 95 segmental arches in the brickwork.