Baby come back

Neil Dawson once told us that one of the reasons for hanging his sculptures in the air was to keep them out of the way of climbers, drunks and thieves. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles probably thought its public sculpture (or should that be, temporary installation?), seeing as how it featured the baby Jesus, was safe from that sort of thing. Not so. We came across another example of Nativity nabbing when we were working on the exhibition When Art Hits the Headlines. In Taihape, a whole life-sized Nativity scene was stolen in the sixties, never to be recovered. The stolen figures were sculpted by a guy called Rosenberg, the same artist who made the giant concrete Madonna who greets drivers heading South into Paraparaumu.