Tuesday, September 04, 2012

That’s big as in big


In our quest to seek out the biggest public sculptures in the world we have finally hit the mother lode. It’s a land work in the UK depicting a woman so big it would take a very long time to walk right round her. From the air, from the ground, what ever way you look at it, the work is big. Big head, big arms, big legs and big all the other bits. You want statistics, here are statistics. 34 meters high, 400 meters long (top to tail measurement) and 1.5 million tonnes of earth (actually it’s not earth so much as slag tailings from a nearby coal mining operation that had to be cleaned up). The whole deal is the work of Charles Jenks, the American architectural theorist and landscape architect. It’s due to be finished next year.