Blog
COBRA outdoor sculpture in Cromer exhibition
COBRA on site in the Grove Hotel
08/07/2025
When I was selected by a panel representing Cromer Artspace - including the Sainsbury Centre's sculpture park curator Rosy Gray - I visited the site - the Grove, an old family hotel outside Cromer with beautiful wooded gardens - to choose a position and look for ideas. I found a wonderfully gloomy childrens' playground dating from the 1930s, with huge splendid rustling trees, uninspiring games such as halved tyres and logs you could hop on and off, a sinister unravelling rope and best of all a pair of ancient swings hanging from prison-grade iron chains.
As I sketched and pondered I recalled that around this coast are pill boxes, strange WW2 concrete installations designed to amplify approaching aircraft noise, telescopes mounted on Cromer pier. Gradually my drawings evolved into a structure that has something of the forlorn playground mixed up with shapes recalling WW2 home-front coastal defences.
The form that developed has circular 'eyes' or disks, holes or wheels and a shpae that invites pushing, pulling and bouncing on its one spindly steel leg. The colours are taken from the playground - a sour yellow, dark leafy green and a pinkish colour taken front my own palms. The effect I am after is something that invites a childlike exploration withy its holoes and ledges, but at the same time is slightly threatening and miliitary,
The construction was financed by an award from First Site Collectors' Club, which I used to pay a carpenter to make the sculpture's carcass while I observed, taking notes and absorbing his construction process to use in my future work. The carcass is really a substrate for the surface painting which follows the form of the sculpture exactly but withy the forms slightly off-key, as though the circles and lines had slid off the understructure.
The sculpture was installed on its steel cradles, slipping into the ground among the fine trees. I have been back to visit it, and to my delight and surprise it has acquired two owl droppings and been colonised by a host of skittering ladybirds, who seem partial to the pink colour.
As I sketched and pondered I recalled that around this coast are pill boxes, strange WW2 concrete installations designed to amplify approaching aircraft noise, telescopes mounted on Cromer pier. Gradually my drawings evolved into a structure that has something of the forlorn playground mixed up with shapes recalling WW2 home-front coastal defences.
The form that developed has circular 'eyes' or disks, holes or wheels and a shpae that invites pushing, pulling and bouncing on its one spindly steel leg. The colours are taken from the playground - a sour yellow, dark leafy green and a pinkish colour taken front my own palms. The effect I am after is something that invites a childlike exploration withy its holoes and ledges, but at the same time is slightly threatening and miliitary,
The construction was financed by an award from First Site Collectors' Club, which I used to pay a carpenter to make the sculpture's carcass while I observed, taking notes and absorbing his construction process to use in my future work. The carcass is really a substrate for the surface painting which follows the form of the sculpture exactly but withy the forms slightly off-key, as though the circles and lines had slid off the understructure.
The sculpture was installed on its steel cradles, slipping into the ground among the fine trees. I have been back to visit it, and to my delight and surprise it has acquired two owl droppings and been colonised by a host of skittering ladybirds, who seem partial to the pink colour.
