Goddess with 100ft Breasts to Rival Angel of the NorthMarch 28, 2005
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
Raiders News Update
FIRST came the Angel of the North. Now motorists using the A1 are to be confronted with the far earthier figure of a giant reclining “goddess” stretching her curves alongside nearly half a mile of the dual carriageway.
The woman, with breasts and hips up to 100ft high, will be created 10 miles north of Newcastle from the waste material generated by open-cast mining, with each of her enormous curves concealing millions of tons of mining spoil.
By the time the “Goddess of the North” is finished in two to three years she should be among the world’s largest sculptures and visible from a passing passenger jet.
Charles Jencks, the renowned landscape sculptor behind the designs, said: “When finished you will see the most incredible curvaceous woman lying there with her left leg over the right and her hair spread out.”
The figure is likely to become as famous as the Angel of the North, the 65ft high metal statue designed by Antony Gormley outside Gateshead, 15 miles to the south.
The idea for the goddess emerged when the Banks Group, a mining and property company, realised there were millions of tons of valuable coal lying under farmland on the Blagdon estate near Shotton, Northumberland.
The site was, however, sandwiched between the East Coast main railway line and the busy A1. With more than 100,000 motorists and rail users passing by each day there were guaranteed to be protests if the landscape were scarred by mining.
They contacted Jencks after his landscaping for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art won the 2004 Gulbenkian prize for museum of the year.
Jencks said: “When most mining companies finish at an open-cast site, they fill it and turn it back into farmland. We wanted to do something that would give back something positive to the community.”
The huge scale of the goddess, particularly the millions of tons of spoil that will have to be moved to create her face, breasts, hips and thighs, would make the project impossibly expensive if it were attempted anywhere else. Open-cast mining, however, relies on some of the biggest earth-moving machinery ever made and Banks has pledged to allow Jencks whatever he needs.
A Banks spokesman said the figure would become the centrepiece of a “land-art park” with footpaths wending their way over and around the goddess.
A foretaste of the designs will come in next Sunday’s edition of ITV’s The South Bank Show, which will showcase some of Jencks’s previous work. Perhaps the best known is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation at his home in Portrack, near Dumfries.
In it he and Maggie Keswick, his late wife, worked with leading physicists, cosmologists and biologists to create landscape metaphors for some of the greatest mysteries of modern science such as the Big Bang that is thought to have created the universe.
The garden is only occasionally open to the public but, when it is, the interest among gardeners is so great that local roads have been blocked by traffic. It features large mounds of earth with paths circling around them, extensive water features and sculptures of stone, metal and wood.
The Goddess of the North will draw on similar designs, but its inspiration comes from a very different source. American-born Jencks says that he has long been fascinated by the ancient British tradition of creating massive works of art on the land, which goes back to neolithic times.
For the Goddess of the North he has drawn on ancient Northumbrian myths, of which the best known is that of Coventina, a goddess of water and springs who was worshipped during Roman times and who was often portrayed naked and reclining.
Jencks plans to reveal his full designs, including models and paintings, at an exhibition in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle on April 20.
Melvyn Bragg, presenter of The South Bank Show, said: “I was impressed by the big statements and questions that he addresses in the cosmic garden, such as the way he attempted to find metaphors for the creation of the universe.
“The reclining goddess is also bold, but the idea of walking over a reclining woman may not appeal to everyone’s tastes.”
Jencks’s plans are part of a planning application which the Banks Group has submitted to Northumberland County Council. Under the scheme, Banks would give the land to a charity along with endowment funds from which the sculpture would be maintained.
A spokeswoman said: “What we hope is that even when mining is fully under way the only thing passers-by will see is the figure of a beautiful woman.”
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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