this enormous sculpture stands at the end of the road which leads away from one of the farms we're looking at. i made husband stop so i could snap a few pictures with the zoom lens from a distance. it stands in all its strangeness on a little hill, with a small shack beside it. i didn't realize it 'til i got the photos home on the computer, but if you look closely down in front just outside that rope that's fencing off the sculpture, there are many little plastic dolls arranged in strange ceremonial homage in the grass.
and just as i was wondering what on earth it was all about, i opened my local newspaper and there was a story about the place. it was done twenty some years ago by an artist named edwin westergren. a swede by birth, he was adopted or at least raised by a family in denmark and ended up on a farm near the large sculpture, making his art. his sons live on the place now, among the now rather overgrown remnants of his sculpture. one son, who looks to be an older man himself from the pictures in the paper, goes around to kindergartens with his soulmate (his words), spreading the joy of native american music to children. as one does if one is an older danish man from the quiet side of the fjord.
it appears we could be moving to an interesting and rather colorful neighborhood. we're taking our favorite polish carpenter (who we would still like to adopt) with us to look at it this weekend, so we're getting closer. we'll just have to hope those people looking at our house this weekend appreciate the new, clean, white, no longer red or artistically balkan, pristine hallway (don't worry, it'll be done by the time they come on sunday). we did leave the maps on the ceiling. we have to have something that's us in this place, we do, after all, live here.
back later with my first week of calendar art journaling and how it's going on that simplicity project. and do be sure to check out the blog camp 365 pool on flickr. it's going very well! and it's not too late for you to join in!
9 comments:
i dream of one day owning a house with a downstairs bathroom that i will wallpaper in maps.
What a marvelous photograph of an equally marvelous sculpture. I would so not have liked to miss it.
About the sculpture ... where's the "Do not Climb on" or "Do Not Touch" signs? Here we have to have warning signs or labels on just about everything. And if that rope is meant to keep people at a distance that too doesn't pass muster. An 8 ft. high chain link fence is what would happen here.
Other than that the sculpture is kinda neat.
Sorry the arty corner is gone - seems you too have people w/no imagination. (Warning sign optional.)
I've adored your house from afar for so long but I just know that your new home will fit the new, evolved you so much better. I wish you happy dreaming as you ponder your new home. : )
maps on the ceiling? swoon
I have to say, it's a striking sculpture. It makes me wonder what it is in monuments that awes us.
I don't think it's great age, necessarily. Nor is it the mysteriousness of the motive in putting it up. A huge and impressive monument is its own justification. If you could ask one of the dudes who put up Stonehenge why they went to the trouble, I bet he'd be a bit hurt, a bit defensive: "You mean, you don't think it's cool?"
I would like to see some public and unmysterious group of people today, put up a circle of giant stone monoliths on some hill.
We could just as easily wonder "what made them do it?"
Love that sculpture and the maps on the ceiling!
Amazing sculpture! One of the joys remembered from our trip to Cornwall was coming upon stone circles 'in the middle of nowhere'. And how fun to read the article right after taking your photos!
Do the figures in the sculpture seem to be beckoning to you?
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