#public-art

Apparently these seven panels are for each of the seven towns this one is twinned with — a crest and a scrap of scenery for each. According to Wikipedia it's one of half a dozen bits of public art round the same town centre, so somebody there was on a mission at some point. I couldn't find out whose idea it was.

Whatever this looked like when it went up, decades of weather have worn it down to a faint charcoal sketch of itself.

Apparently Helvetia is the woman who turns up on Swiss coins — a stand-in for the country, like Britannia. The idea here, from what I've read, is that she's climbed down off the coin and gone travelling: shield set aside, spear down, suitcase packed. You'll come across her on the embankment in Kleinbasel.

From what I could find, the way he works is to have a big block of granite quarried and split, then stand it back up with the drill marks left in plain sight — you're meant to be able to tell it was taken apart and put together again. This one sits outdoors in Switzerland. I couldn't find out who asked for it, or why it got the name it did.

The outfit behind this has apparently done hundreds of painted walls, mostly around France, and the trick is always the same: a blank gable end dressed up as a building that isn't there, with people leaning out of it. They say the figures are usually locals, or names the area is known for.

He made the same reclining shape over and over for something like fifty years. Apparently they were cast in editions too, so this isn't the only one of it — versions of the same thing sit in a few different countries.

I couldn't find much written about this one at all. The three lots of material look like the point — one that'd rot, one that'd shift, one that'd still be sitting there in a century — which would explain the title. It comes out of the same county-wide scheme as a lot of sculpture up there: put outdoors, next to roads, where people who weren't looking for it run into it anyway.

This one belongs to a scheme from the nineties, from what I can tell — a Norwegian county paying for a sculpture in every one of its municipalities and putting them out in the landscape rather than in a gallery. The Latin on it is the old naming of the winds. Whether it does anything you can hear when the weather turns, I couldn't find out.

According to Wikipedia, the man who made it ended up in London after surviving a Soviet labour camp, and spent the rest of his life doing huge ceramic walls like this one. This is just one panel — the whole thing runs along what used to be the civic centre in Peckham, telling the story of one road. They say it's protected now, so it stays even though the building's changed hands.

From what I can find this went up around his hundredth birthday, which is some age to be handed a wall that long. It's outside on the Place des Nations rather than in, so you don't need a pass to get a look at it.

Apparently it isn't painted at all — it's ceramic tile, fired in pieces and fixed to the front, which is how it's survived decades outdoors. I couldn't find out who decided the building needed one.

Wikipedia says it's nine metres of Brazilian sodalite, propped up on a block so the whole thing leans. The bit everyone seems to agree on is that it became the place people arrange to meet — 'see you at the blue stone' — which as far as I can tell nobody planned.

He kept going back to the same reclining woman for something like fifty years — dozens of versions, and most of them cast more than once, which is why so many cities ended up with one. Apparently this is one of the late ones, made when he was in his eighties and running what was effectively a small factory.