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How a New York art class is helping the RCMP put faces and stories to mysterious skulls

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Forensic imaging specialist Joe Mullins adds clay muscles to the replica of a skull at the New York Academy of Art. Mr. Mullins’s assignment was to reconstruct the face of a man found dead on a Nova Scotia beach, while his students did the same for other human remains from an RCMP database.

Photography by Jeenah Moon/The Globe and Mail

The body washed ashore in a hurricane: Middle-aged male, pristine Terra work boots, tattered Urban Heritage jeans, face lost to decomposition and surf.

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The location provided few leads.

Sandy Cove Beach, N.S., is situated along the Bay of Fundy’s southern shore. Powerful tides there are known to suck in flotsam from as far away as Boston before belching it back out into the Atlantic. With Hurricane Dorian’s churning winds added to the mix, it was impossible to say where the man had come from.

When nobody from the tight-knit Digby area came forward last fall, investigators began looking more widely.

But as winter descended, the identity remained an enigma, and Digby Man was added, alongside 714 other entries, to the RCMP’s national database of unidentified remains.

The database is a storehouse for some of the country’s most vexing cases. Many show signs of violent ends — bullet holes, broken limbs, cracked skulls. But the entries consist largely of assorted bones and clothing fragments, not enough to create the facial reconstructions necessary for issuing public appeals.

To get anywhere on Digby Man, investigators needed a face. But how?

Earlier this month, the RCMP turned to art students and a world-renowned forensic imaging specialist — a conjurer of lost souls — for an answer. The force sent an industrious Mountie and 15 skulls to the Manhattan-based New York Art Academy in a last-ditch effort to solve some of the country’s toughest cases.

Within two weeks, the identity of Digby Man would be solved by means that show both the possibilities and limitations of the RCMP’s efforts.

“A face is just so vitally important to these cases,” said Corporal Charity Sampson, the RCMP identification specialist who accompanied the skulls to New York. “Without good facial reconstruction, they may be lost forever.”

Joe Mullins explains the structure of the human skull to his students in New York.

The idea emerged from a class Ms. Sampson took last summer on facial imaging. Joe Mullins, the instructor, had earned headlines in previous years for conducting a one-week workshop at the New York Academy of Art where students performed facial reconstructions on unidentified skulls held by the city’s chief medical examiner. In just four years, the students, who are classically trained in anatomy, had been so successful reconstructing faces that they’d nearly cleared the city medical examiner’s backlog of unidentified skulls. That left Mr. Mullins with a quandary. He told Ms. Sampson that he needed skulls.

“I thought to myself, I bet I can get Joe some skulls,” she said.

The RCMP normally employs three forensic artists, but this would be a rare opportunity to complete 15 faces in five days. Over the next four months, Ms. Sampson overcame a series of bureaucratic hurdles. She got buy-in from the RCMP, convinced the B.C. Coroners Service and the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner Service to put forward 15 well-preserved skulls and made nylon replicas of each one using a high-end 3-D printer at the National Research Council (handling and transporting real skulls has legal and ethical restrictions).

In the first weekend of January, Ms. Sampson hopped aboard an RCMP plane to New York City, more curious than ever about the backgrounds of the 15 skulls in her luggage.

“I have really thought of nothing else for five months,” she said shortly after landing. “I’m so excited to see faces on them. I have been looking at them a long time. A long time.”

Her thoughts kept wandering back to one skull in particular, Digby Man. “That’s the one that intrigues me most,” says Cpl. Sampson. “I’m from Nova Scotia. It’s the most recently recovered one. Memories are still fresh. It’s a good time to put a face on him and get him out to the public.”

MFA student Kelly Robert works on her project.

The art students got their skulls on a Monday.

Kelly Robert, an MFA student with more than 20 years of experience in jewelry production, rubbed a tattooed forearm in nervous anticipation. When Mr. Mullins, the instructor, finally handed her a skull, she expelled a long “wooooooow” as she stared into the hollow eye sockets. “Oh wow.”

Ms. Robert had done the class before. Her art tends toward more abstract sculpture, but she returned for the sense of altruism in the workshop. Her skull this time around, that of a white or Indigenous man discovered in Vancouver in 1989, had no teeth. “It’s like the mouth is pulling in the rest of the face,” she said.

Other students pored over the scant details that came with their subjects’ back stories.

One skull had been recovered near a chairlift on Whistler Mountain in 1987 with a clear bullet exit wound in the cranium. Another four came out of B.C.’s Fraser River between 1972 and 2008. One skull was discovered in 40 feet of water accompanied by underwear labelled Edmonton Psychiatric Center.

“These are lost, lost souls,” Mr. Mullins told his students. “There are family members out there frozen in uncertainty. Hopefully you can help answer some questions.”

Mr. Mullins, surrounded by his students, gets to work on his project.

Mr. Mullins took on Digby Man.

Though computerized methods of facial reconstruction exist, Mr. Mullins prefers lower-tech tools: molding clay (200 pounds by week’s end), superglue, marbles, plastic straws, cheese cutters and assorted other sculpting tools.

“Even with a computer, it’s not like CSI,” he said. “There’s no instant add-face-to-skull button. It takes time.”

Despite the setting, this is not an art class, as Mr. Mullins continually reminds his students. “Leave your artistic license at the door, “ he warns. “You do not have it. There is no room for interpretation. You have to put the right face on.”

Most of the skulls come with detached jaw bones. The first order of business is attaching them using cotton balls, generous amounts of superglue and a dab of forensic humour. “Make sure you don’t get any cotton in your external auditory meatus,” Mr. Mullins says. “Better known as your ear hole.”

He teaches according to the Manchester Method of forensic facial reconstruction, which puts an emphasis on facial muscles and soft tissue thickness to accurately gauge facial proportions. It’s a science, but an imperfect one. In studies where subjects have to match a reconstructed face with an original, they generally pick the right one 70 per cent of the time. A 2006 study that compared two skull reconstructions to their original faces using CT imaging found that 67 per cent of the reconstructions were accurate to within 2mm. The tip of the nose showed the highest degree of error.

Once the skulls are mounted on adjustable stands, the students layer 11 muscles on either side of the face. First is the temporalis, or temple. Last is the zygomaticus major, or the smile muscle. At this point, the skulls look somehow undignified, less human and more Terminator.

Next, students cut lengths of plastic straw coinciding with average soft tissue thickness at specific points on the skull. The pieces are depth markers guiding students on how thick or thin they should layer their clay skin. So adorned, the skulls acquire a distinctly spiky Hellraiser appearance.

As the week rolls by, Mr. Mullins gives demonstrations on eyes, ears, noses, lips and hair. The faces slowly come to life. The process has a profound effect on many of the students.

“It’s a little emotional,” says Anita Clipston, a Vancouver resident in the class working on a middle-aged Indigenous skull with dentures. She speaks in a respectful whisper, as if at a funeral. “When I went home last night I had two thoughts running through my head: Does this person have a family? And, if not, where do you have to be in life that you go missing and nobody is looking for you? In sculpting we’re used to working on generic skulls based on real ones, but this is a real life, a real person — we don’t know who. I thought I’d feel more scientific about this, but I do feel this responsibility now.”

She opted into the workshop both because of a long-time fascination with shows like CSI and for the opportunity to restore a name to the nameless. She specifically sought out an Indigenous subject.

“This means a great deal to me,” she says. “I’m keenly aware from my First Nations friends of how many Indigenous people do go missing in Vancouver.”

Anita Clipston works on the skull of a middle-aged Indigenous man.

Mr. Mullins supplies eyes in the form of clear white marbles. Students draw a circular iris on each one, 11.5 mm in diameter, with a dot in the middle for a pupil. They use a brown (the most common eye colour) Sharpie to make a wagon-wheel pattern around the iris. Suddenly, it’s like 15 new souls have just entered the room.

“At the beginning, all the skulls look similar,” said Ms. Sampson. “By the time the eyes and lips go on, there was true personality in the room. It was incredible.”

There’s a formula to placing most parts of the face. The tops of the ears, for instance, align with the eyebrow ridge and the lobes typically line up with the tip of the nose. The shape of the lobes is related to the shape of the mastoid process, that pointy part of the skull directly behind the ears.

The nose is more complicated. Mr. Mullins shows his students how to project its shape by following the paths of the nasal bone (which forms the bridge) and the nasal spine (the bony projection between the nostrils). The nasal spine is one of the most telling points on any skull. It acts like an arrow to identify a nose that points up, down or straight ahead, often one of the key defining features of any face.

This little information-rich nub also happens to be one of the most fragile parts of the skull. “You can flick it with your finger and snap it off,” says Mr. Mullins. “Of the hundreds and hundreds of skulls I’ve done, it’s very rare that I get a good nasal spine. It’s one of the most elusive pieces of the skull.”

The Digby skull has no nasal spine, so Mr. Mullins has no choice but to give it a straight-ahead, generic nose.

Mr. Mullins, lacking the cues in the bone needed for a more precise reconstruction of the nose, gave Digby Man a generic-looking nose.

By Thursday morning, Digby Man is nearing completion. The remains discovered on a Nova Scotia beach last year now has a face. Digby Man is handsome, with a tall forehead and sad eyes. Still, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

Mr. Mullins has worked on hundreds of reconstructions that have led to dozens of identifications, though he doesn’t know exactly how many. He can never guess which ones will get solved.

“Remember, this is a last-ditch effort,” he said. “Nothing is happening with these cases otherwise.”

The Academy workshops have led to at least four positive identifications. In a previous class, Kathleen Gallo reconstructed the skull of an apparent migrant border crosser whose body was found in the desert of Pima County, Ariz. The man was identified shortly after Ms. Gallo’s finished sculpture went public and his remains have since been returned to his family. “After that, I was hooked,” says Ms. Gallo, who took the workshop again this year and is pursuing forensic reconstructions as a career. “Not only is it an artistic workout, but it’s a mental and ethical workout as well.”

Kathleen Gallo took the class before, reconstructing a skull from Arizona that helped identify an apparent border crosser.

The RCMP uploaded all the faces to canadasmissing.ca on Jan. 13. Solid tips began to trickle in. For a positive ID to be made, someone would have to come forward linking the face to a name. Dental and DNA work would then be conducted to confirm the match. “You just need the right person to see that face,” says Cpl. Sampson, after returning to Ottawa. “It may not be today or even this year. At some point, the right person will see someone they love in this database and the link will be made. The important thing is they now have a face.”

One week later came a bombshell in the Digby case. Nova Scotia RCMP announced they’d identified the remains. There was a caveat: The reconstruction played an indirect role, at best.

Digby Man was actually Brent McLellan, a 43-year-old Saint John man who’d leapt from Reversing Falls Bridge the previous summer. A tourist’s photograph had provided confirmation of the death, but the body wasn’t recovered at the time.

He’d been a star athlete and belonged to the Saint John Sports Hall of Fame through his membership on 2001-2002 Saint John Alpines, winners of the 2001 Canadian Senior Baseball Championship. More recently, however, he’d struggled with a bipolar diagnosis and addictions issues, his mother said. The family held a memorial mass in July. Eight hundred people showed up, but it did little to comfort his mother.

“The whole time I’ve been thinking about Brent in that cold water,” Marjorie McLellan told The Globe this week. “That’s not a good thing for a parent to be thinking about every single day.”

The finished Digby Man reconstruction, shown in an RCMP handout picture, and Brent McLellan, shown in an undated family photo.

The day the workshop started, RCMP headquarters promoted the program on its social media feeds. Nova Scotia RCMP added a picture of the Terrra work boots from Digby Man. A friend of Mr. McLellan’s saw the photo and notified police, saying she’d been with Mr. McLellan when he bought the boots for a job at a graveyard. They had a DNA match within days.

“You will never know how good we felt that day when the DNA came back positive,” said Ms. McLellan. “Oh, it was just wonderful.”

She was less thrilled about her son’s reconstruction. It lacks perhaps the defining feature of Mr. McLellan’s face, an upturned nose. “I was disheartened when I first saw it because it didn’t look anything like Brent to me,” she said. “My girls looked at it and disagreed. They said if you look at the ears and the eyes it’s him.”

The McLellan case offered Mr. Mullins a rare opportunity to compare his handiwork to the source material. He understands Ms. McLellan’s reservations, but says the absence of a nasal spine limited what he could do with the nose. “Without that nasal spine, the only thing you can do is build a straight-out nose,” he said. “That’s the only choice you have.”

Upon review, though, he says the work stands up. “When I did a side-to-side comparison, I felt pretty good,” he said. “The proportions are there. The stature is on point. Everything lines up where it should be. Given the information I had, it was the best face I could do.”

Without the publicity surrounding the workshop, it’s difficult to say whether the match would’ve been made. But the details don’t matter to Ms. McLellan. Any method that provides even a remote shot at recovering lost souls and providing relief to grieving families is worthwhile, she said. “This method maybe didn’t work for Brent, but I know it will work for others,” she said. “It was euphoria knowing that Brent wasn’t in that cold water anymore. Other families deserve that feeling.”

Mounties still have many more people to identify, with help from the New York class’s reconstructions.

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Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

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Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

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End of carousel

I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

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For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. – The New York Times

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When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty. Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.

“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said. Which was Serra’s bottom line — in his case, nudging sculpture into new territory. Why else be an artist? This was how he thought. Old-school. Old Testament. For him, art was all or nothing.

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Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.

That said, not many artists accomplished what he set out to do, in the process seeing public perception of his work flip 180 degrees.

All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.

“I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble,” he said.

It was now two decades later and thousands of his adoring fans filled an auditorium in Brazil. He and I had flown to Rio to do a public talk. The audience had come to hear the lion roar. By then, he and his voice had softened. But not his message.

He compared art with science. You don’t advance science by public consensus, he said. Then he described the time he had splashed molten lead against the wall and adjoining sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so appalled uptight Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.

He was thumbing his nose at the stuffy sanctity of the museum, he explained, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture, and at the same time swapping industrial materials like lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, like marble, pedestals and clay.

Around the same time, he lifted up the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber scavenged from a warehouse in Lower Manhattan, making a kind of tent, balanced just so — a topography, implying action. He wasn’t trying to make something crowd-pleasing or familiar or beautiful, he recalled. It wasn’t beautiful. It was an experiment.

Was it art?

That was the question.

It was the same question Pollock raised when he painted “Autumn Rhythm.” Pollock had also stalked the canvas, as it lay on the floor of his Long Island studio. He prowled its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint. Lines in the picture recorded his choreography.

“Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, depthless, describing only itself, not an image of anything else — a floating field of wild, exquisite tracery that viewers would need to navigate and decipher for themselves. Even Pollock wasn’t sure what it signified.

Pollock “had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements,” Serra said. “After all, he didn’t know where he would end up when he started.”

Serra had started his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet whiff of a faded Polaroid. It was a cobblestone and cast-iron version of Russia in the 1910s, driven by ego and revolution. Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves without running water that cost about $75 a month and he fell into a community of ingenious and groundbreaking composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer. The list goes on. Cheap rent, available real estate and restlessness. The cocktail of urban creativity and change.

“There was a clear understanding among us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.

By then, a global public had come to adore his elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits. They were democratic adventures, depending on what you brought to them. A moviemaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of an unspooling film, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending. A writer on the Holocaust once likened their high walls to pens.

I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings. When Serra was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked sunbathers reclining on the ground inside “Torqued Ellipse IV,” which occupied a patch of the museum’s garden.

So what changed over the years to bring the public around?

I’m not sure it was Serra, who stuck to his guns. There is a work by him called “1-1-1-1,” from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held erect by a pole resting on top of them, itself stabilized by a fourth plate teetering on its end. It looks scary and precarious, but the balancing act can also remind you of Buster Keaton.

It used to be described as obdurate and menacing. But that is not, I don’t think, how Serra ever saw his work. After the MoMA retrospective, I passed a late summer afternoon in Italy, watching Serra patiently, quietly accompany my older son, who was still in grade school, around the ancient temples at Paestum. Serra spoke, as if to an adult, about the swell of the weathered columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of one another and held each other up. For him, sculpture distilled to its essential qualities — mass, gravity, weight, volume — was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions over the centuries.

“I don’t know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did,” he told me back in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.” “And that was, what, almost half a century ago?”

It’s hard to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.

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‘Eye-wounding erection’: UK public art that is loved or hated

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It was described by one council planner as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted and has attracted so much controversy that no artist has admitted to making it. But the outside a Cambridge office block, which is to be taken down years after it appeared, is not alone as a work of divisive public art.

Here we take a look at other sculptures and installations that have split opinion:

The Meeting Place

Paul Day’s 9m tall bronze statue of a couple embracing in St Pancras International railway station, known by some as “The Lovers statue”, is often the first thing you see when you step off the Eurostar.

But, like public displays of affection, this artwork has not always been warmly received. The artist Antony Gormley said it was “a very good example of the crap out there” while the artistic director at the Royal Academy of Arts, Tim Marlow, said it was a “terrible, schmaltzy, sentimental piece of kitsch”.

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However, Lonely Planet listed St Pancras under The World’s Most Romantic Spots, citing the statue as a key reason.

The Tree of Life

The six-metre iron sculpture of a dead tree outraged many residents of Kirkby, Merseyside, when it was “planted” as part of a £320,000 revamp of the town centre.

Designed by the artist Geoff Wood, some residents likened the sculpture to a giant twiglet. Many took umbrage with its cost, believed to be about £60,000 at a time when public services were struggling.

ArcelorMittal Orbit

The Orbit at 114.5-metres is Britain’s largest piece of public art. Found in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, it was constructed to mark London’s hosting of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Designed by the Turner-Prize winning artist Anish Kapoor, the sculpture received a mixed reception. In October 2012, it was nominated and made the Building Design magazine shortlist for the Carbuncle Cup – an award for the worst British building completed in the past year.

Couple

Completed in 2007 in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, the installation by Sean Henry shows two substantial figures of a man and woman in clothing, facing out to sea, standing on a large-scale tapered platform structure.

The Times’ chief art critic called the statue “a visually obnoxious pair of painted bronze lovers”, while the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said it was the “stupidest sculpture of the past 20 years” and an “eye-wounding erection”.

Coverage in the Chronicle Live suggested the community was coming round to the sculpture, with residents saying the town was largely split down the middle. A poll on the news website showed 52% found it beautiful, while 48% found it stupid.

Apollo Pavilion

Designed by the British artist and architect Victor Pasmore, the Apollo Pavilion was completed in 1969 in Peterlee, County Durham.

Made of large geometric planes of white reinforced concrete, it immediately met complaints and campaigns, and later started to decay when the body that funded the sculpture was disbanded and the local council refused to intervene.

However, it did have its supporters and ultimately, despite conflicting campaigns, it was restored and awarded Grade II-listed status in 2011.

The Hare and the Minotaur

Designed by the Gloucestershire-based artist Sophie Ryder, the giant sculpture of the mythical minotaur and a hare has been dividing the residents of the regency spa town of Cheltenham since it was put on display on thepromenade in the late 90s.

The bone of contention has always been the minotaur’s huge penis, which is on full display as the creature sits atop an oversized bench. Because of the scale of the sculpture, the penis, about the size of a decent swiss roll, is at eyeline height for most.

However, the statue has endured and was swiftly returned to its place after a brief period of restoration in 2017.

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