# tlohde

trees in jupiter

18:34 10/05/2026
455 words
contents

I was coaxed out of the house.[1]

We went to Jupiter Artland for a walk around the sculpture park. Glorious weather: blue skies and fluffly clouds.

A few hours spent walking through the woodland with big bits of art to look at very few minutes.

Personal favourites include (in no particular order): Stone Coppice and Stone House, both by Andy Goldsworthy and Quarry (Fig 0) by Phyllida Barlow.

A sculpture in the woods: a cement and steel tower, with an irregular hexagon of rusty steel atop, like a halo, set in woodland
⛶↗  Fig 0: Quarry by Phyllida Barlow.

Naturally, I was also drawn to the two most geometric ones: Anish Kapoor's Suck and Firmament by Antony Gormley (Fig 2)

a mosaic of two images; on the left a view looking up at a blue sky, with fragments of a few fluffly clouds, through Antony Gormley's Firmament sculpture which is comprised of steel elements joined in a complex lattice. The sky is very blue. The second image is the shadow cast by the sculpture
⛶↗  Fig 2: Firmament, and it's shadow, by Antony Gormley.

honourable mention

goes to Rivers, by Tania Kovats, for a collection of glass flasks containing water from one hundred different rivers around the British Isles[2]

the best

As talented as the above artists are, the best sculptures there were the trees (Fig 2 & 3 ) themselves.

looking up the trunk of a mature birch tree (i think) with its many limbs jutting out at all angles and its canopy half-heartedly masking a gloriously blue sky
⛶↗  Fig 2: ~400 million years the in making.
a dense woodland with many medium sized trees all leaning a bit to the right. Green grass below; blue sky with a few fluffly white clouds above
⛶↗  Fig 3: conceptually, i love it.

it is now

One piece comprised a few carved and cast bronzes of crying girls, hair covering their faces, leaning against trees, or standing forlornly in a small clearing. On the map of Jupiter Artland, where all the pieces are described in a sentence or two, this one is accompanied by the line

the site I have picked at Jupiter has a quiet, melancholic atomosphere

It wasn't until you put sculptures of half a dozen upset children there.

footnotes

  1. that's no bad thing ↩︎

  2. not wanting to cast doubt on the authenticity of this piece, but the samples were all very clean ↩︎