A walk in the garden
“The Drummer”: Barry Flanagan
Chatsworth gardens
Went on a pleasant walk around Chatsworth today and saw this sculpture. The photo gives a good sense of the scale of the piece. It towers over the public as they walk towards it on the path. It has got to be an almost perfect matching up of artwork and location, with the deeply pagan presence that it creates within the glorious woodland.
Chatsworth contains a lot of semi permanant contemporary sculpture, but this is my favourite. I remember seeing the original exhibition of the first smaller “hare figures” at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1983. Their lyricism and wit were memorable at the time and I remember everyone talking about them. This large scale version uses all that original creative power and makes something more. Something fascinating and broodingly iconic.