She's a big lass, she's a bonny lass...
Sep. 22nd, 2012 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomust
Northumberlandia is - in one of those carefully limited superlatives - "the world's largest human landform sculpture", an immense female form reclining beside the opencast mine from whose waste and with whose equipment she was constructed.
She is 'the Lady of the North', an obvious riposte to the Angel of the North, and not the first to respond by aiming to outdo the Angel in terms of scale. Where the Angel is male (whatever the gender of angels in general, the Angel of the North, modelled by Antony Gormley on his own body with the addition of a pair of aeroplane wings, is male), upright, dominating, Northumberlandia reclines, passive, and receives the visitors who wander all over her. "Such figurative interpretations of earth goddesses could be seen as kitsch", says the Guardian.
Despite the very traditional use of the female form, there's a certain nervousness in the depiction of this great naked woman. Her upper body lies flat on its back, face and breasts to the sky, but she twists round coyly, presenting hip, knee and ankles to the visitor. The two viewing mounds between which you approach the site are each topped with a small cairn bearing one of a seies of plaques, but the plaques on her breasts are set flush to the ground, no suggestion here of an erect nipple.
Think of her not as a sculpture to be evaluated aesthetically, but simply as a pleasant place to walk. She is a quarter of a mile long; the publicity says that a total of four miles of paths wind about her surface, but to walk the full length would be a purely ritual activity, like treading out one of those medieval mazes. We must have walked a mile or so, climbing to all her summits, admiring the view to the sea on way, the Cheviot the other. She was crowded with dog-walkers, families with push-chairs, children running on ahead of their parents, a woman singing to her toddler:
Row, row, row your boatLess a sculpture, more a different kind of neighbourhood park.
Gently down the - river.
If you meet a polar bear,
Don't forget to shiver.
We took our picnic to Plessey Woods, and walked beside the river Blyth. And there was an unexpected retail opportunity on the way home at Blagdon Farm Shop.
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