Cardiff Bay: Blue Beacon

I'd walked past this artwork many times before I paused to look at it more closely, possibly because it's located outside Bute Town Police Station, and I've never thought it a good idea to be seen lingering outside police stations. 

I've called this blog 'Blue Beacon' but I've also seen this artwork called 'Lighthouse' and 'Blue Light' – I'm not sure which is correct. 

According to his website, this piece was designed by British sculptor Mark Renn (1952–2019), with assistance in the design development and fabrication management from Mick Thacker. 

The 60-foot-tall stainless steel construction is the work of 'A1 Stainless, South Wales Monuments, Richard Williams', and there's also an LED lighting system that produces a pulsing blue light at night. 

The granite base of the structure is inscribed with a poem, 'The Ballast Bank', from the publication Zen Cymru, by Peter Finch. 

You can read the poem in full on Finch's website, which offers the following explanation for the piece and its relevance to the location:

The Ballast Bank is a poem by Peter Finch which has been incorporated into Renn and Thackers' Blue Light public artwork at the entrance to the South Wales Police Headquarters on James Street, Cardiff. This station is built very near where in the early days of Cardiff as a trading port stood a quarter mile bank of off-loaded ballast. This had been dumped by arriving ships making space for their outgoing cargoes of iron and coal. The Bank is clearly visible on John Wood's late 1830s map of the town.

The artwork puts some of that ballast bank back. The poem delineates the races, language groupings, trades and ideas which flowed in and out of the burgeoning industrial town as it exponentially developed. In its original form the poem circled Renn and Thacker's silver tower to run across the station entrance steps, in through the doors, up across reception finishing on the reception desk's surface.

According to the newspaper Wales Online, there seems to have been some controversy and criticism about the erection of this artwork, not surprising when you consider that upwards of £70,000 of taxpayers' money was used to pay for it in 2013.

Cardiff Bay: Bowline Knot

Located off Havannah Street, at one of the entrances to Cardiff Bay Wetland Reserve, partially obscured behind the circle of shrubs that surrounds it and officially called Bowline Knot (according to the Cardiff Public Art Register), but also known as the Rope Knot, this 'cast bronze and mild steel' sculpture was created by Andrew Rowe in 2000.

The sculpture models a length of rope tied to a ring that is set into the ground with a bowline knot, the type that was traditionally used to tie ships to the dock at which they had moored. The art register reports that 'this bronze sculpture reflects Cardiff Bay's heritage as one of the worlds [sic] principal coal-exporting ports.'

You can read about Andrew Rowe's career on the Fresh Air website, and learn more about his current work and see examples of his formidable artworks on the website of DAR Design, the company he founded in 1990.

Penarth : Skytown Gateway

I’m several months late to the party but today I’d like to celebrate the fact that this year Penarth has gained a new public artwork, and, though I think it fails in its aspirations, I rather like the piece itself. 

You might, justifiably, wonder how the Vale of Glamorgan Council managed to fund something like this given the financial challenges of the current global pandemic. In fact, this was part of the development deal, the obligations negotiated under the Section 106 agreement, when Council granted planning permission for the Penarth Heights housing development. 

The Skytown Gateway sits above the central entrance to Dingle Park, on Windsor Road in Penarth. According to the Council’s website, the park’s ‘entrances and boundary railings were considered to be unsightly’ so were ‘identified as requiring an upgrade in order to provide a visually impressive, exciting and high quality gateway into the town.’ A well-meaning sentiment perhaps, and the railings do look much better since they’ve been refurbished, but neither the lower nor upper entrances to the park have changed at all and they are, in fact, the entrances that get most use. And, though I do think the gateway artwork is impressive, its effect as a town rather than a park gateway is lost by its position immediately adjacent to a roundabout, which drivers of passing traffic are, hopefully, concentrating on negotiating rather than glancing around at the scenery. Also, as there is nowhere nearby to park, visitors to the town are unlikely to stop to admire the artwork, so as a ‘gateway into the town’, it fails. 

As a ‘visually impressive’ gateway, though, I think it’s a winner, and the makers, a company called Cod Steaks from Bristol, have done a great job of capturing the character of the town. The Council website page about the Skytown Gateway project includes a link to a report from Cod Steaks on their creation process, including consultations with the local community and workshops with local school children to develop the ideas behind the finished artwork. It’s interesting to note that their workshops initially focused on the local flora and fauna, as you might expect from a gateway to a park, but the end product refers only to the built heritage of the town with no reference at all to the natural environment, a missed opportunity but presumably a deliberate decision by the Council. 

As you can see in my photographs, the gateway includes references to many well-known local buildings and to the town’s maritime history. Residents will recognise St Augustine’s Church, the Penarth Pier Pavilion, the former public swimming baths, and the old Custom House, as well as generic terraced houses and a town house, the town clock and the lamp standards that run along the Esplanade. From the surrounding maritime landscape, there are the lighthouse on the island of Flat Holm and the Pink Shed, formerly used for yachting race officials, that sits on an arm of the Cardiff Barrage, and a tug boat. And representing local tourism and recreational facilities, the artwork includes a yacht and a caravan. 

The Cod Steaks project report notes that the artwork has been constructed from over 4000 pieces of precision-cut steel, finished with blue paint, and includes low-level LED lighting within the buildings, which must look quite lovely at night – I have yet to visit in the evenings so have no visuals of the ‘diffused, charming glow’ of the lighting effects. When I do get some photos, I’ll add one or two to this post.

Cardiff art: ‘People Like Us’

This is one of my favourite public artworks in Cardiff. 

It stands in one of the busiest areas of Cardiff Bay, amidst the cafes, restaurants and bars of Mermaid Quay, so I had to wait for a cold winter morning to get the photo, at right, with no people around.

The sculpture, called ‘People Like Us’ (‘Pobl Fel Ni’ in Welsh), is aptly named, as it certainly attracts people: they insinuate themselves amongst the figures for photos, lean next to the man as if engaging him in conversation, and children pat the dog as if it’s a favourite household pet.

‘People Like Us’ is a life-size bronze artwork by English sculptor John Clinch (1934 - 2001), whose intention was ‘to make something that somehow ‘gave a voice”’ to the diverse cultural and ethnic mix of people who have always lived and worked in the dockland area of Cardiff.

If the body structure of the male in this sculpture looks familiar, it’s because John Clinch also designed ‘From Pit To Port’, a sculpture celebrating Cardiff’s mining heritage that featured in a previous blog post here.

‘People Like Us’ is a much more personable sculpture I think, one that people can easily relate to, one that conveys a sense of rest and relaxation – the woman with her shoe off is a delightful touch.

I think John Clinch would be very pleased with how well his work is appreciated by those who visit Cardiff Bay.

Cardiff art: Cargoes

If you liked the Beastie Benches, you’ll love Cargoes. This is another of Cardiff Bay’s superb public artworks, though you can’t sit on these ones and, unfortunately, their positioning on building walls in Bute and Stuart Streets, amidst the distractions of restaurant and shop signage, means they are not easily appreciated and frequently overlooked.

Just like the Beastie Benches, the 21 panels of this artwork were inspired by poetry, in this case John Masefield’s poem Cargoes. This is a poem I actually learnt in high school, though it seems an odd choice for the New Zealand school syllabus. And, though John Masefield’s only connection with Cardiff appears to have been a passing one – he caught a ship from here to Chile in 1874, the subject matter is certainly relevant. Cardiff was once one of the largest docks in the world, handling the export of huge quantities of iron and millions of tonnes of coal from the south Wales coalfields, and all manner of cargo passed through its basins and warehouses.

The sculptor of Cargoes, Brian Fell, is one of Britain’s leading artists in steel, and his public artworks can be seen throughout the UK. Cardiff has two more of his major pieces, one of which is a particular favourite of mine – but more on that in a future blog.

As you will see below, Fell’s panels illustrate the various items named (in bold type) in Masefield’s poem (from Salt-Water Poems and Ballads, edited by John Masefield, Macmillan, New York, 1944, p. 124).

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Cardiff art: the Beastie Benches

Cardiff is blessed with some rather lovely public artworks, none more so than the Beastie Benches, a series of nine carved brick benches that can be found in the Britannia Park and Quay area that runs along two sides of Roath Basin at Cardiff Bay.

These are the work of Welsh sculptor Gwen Heeney, a ceramics expert who specialises in working with brick. Her raw materials, the terracotta bricks, came from Dennis of Ruabon, the very same brick and tile company that supplied the decorative panels for the Bay’s iconic Pierhead building more than a hundred years ago.

The Beastie Benches are aptly named. The Beasts were inspired by the mythical creatures brought to life in ‘The Ballad of the Long Legged Bait’, one of the most well-known of famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s poems. It’s a very long poem, too long to reproduce in full in this post, but here’s a link if you fancy a read. 

The poem’s subject matter has been much discussed by critics since Thomas’s early death in 1953 at just 39 years of age. With allusions to literary and scientific works and the Bible, with plays on words and multiple layers of meaning, it may describe Thomas’s own voyage through life, it could be about a series of sexual experiences and their consequences, or it may relate to the search for salvation through the mortification of the flesh.

Heeney has taken lines and phrases from the poem and allowed her imagination to transform these into the mythical creatures that now provide a welcome place to sit on a sunny day. The names of the benches are fascinating enough in themselves: The lured fish under the foam; Sing and howl through sand and anemone; Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl; Venus lies star-struck in her wound; Bird after dark; and the laughing fish; In the continent of a fossil; Turns the moon-chained and water-wound Metropolis of fishes; and There is nothing left of the sea.

I dare you to sit on one of these and not be inspired to write your own poem or paint a vivid picture. 

The lured fish under the foam

Sing and howl through sand and anemone

Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl

Venus lies star-struck in her wound

Bird after dark (It seems the bird has been the subject of some after-dark shenanigans!)

and the laughing fish

In the continent of a fossil

Turns the moon-chained and water-wound Metropolis of fishes

There is nothing left of the sea