St Austell’s unwanted Earth Goddess
Regular readers will know I find the area around St Austell as inspirational as Wordsworth did the Lake District or Hardy of Wessex. However, the actual town of St Austell isn’t much to write home about. Most of it is a ghastly 1970s concrete shopping centre and the rest is run down. The only decent architecture – Victorian mining-related buildings and Methodist churches – seem to be boarded up. That said, the centre is pedestrianised and the council does its best with lots of flower boxes around town. There’s also an art trail, comprising of 14 artworks dotted around town (featured in the Guardian’s ‘10 of the best new UK attractions to visit in 2021’), and in June this year, the unveiling of artist Sandy Brown’s Earth Goddess, which has been surprisingly controversial and attracted much criticism.
The £80,000 ceramic sculpture, at 11.5m, said to be largest of its kind in the UK, if not the world, took three years to complete. Conceived as an Angel of the North for the south west, it may lack the impact of Gormley’s iron angel, yet the now-iconic Gateshead landmark received similar criticism at the time, with local newspapers and politicians running campaigns against the sculpture. One newspaper even compared it to a 1930s Nazi statue. Time has been kind to the angel, and it’s now credited with helping spearhead the rejuvenation of the north east.
Cornwall’s Earth Goddess has received hundreds of complaints, something I find extraordinary as it’s situated in an ugly concrete square surrounded by hideous shops and cafes (including a Costa), where around the corner a monstrous Farmfoods warehouse has opened, surrounded by roads chock-a-block with traffic, in one of the most deprived parts of Europe (St Austell has high rates of poverty, unemployment, crime, domestic abuse and drug use). What I’m trying to say is, of all the things you could complain about in St Austell (called by many St Awful), is a work of art created to enliven your heart and soul, and celebrate the local China clay industry, really the place to focus your negative energy?
The sculpture has been called an eyesore, a corkscrew, sword and kebab, and there’s now a petition with over 400 signatures to have it removed. Suddenly everyone’s an art critic (‘I know what I like’). One resident has even called Earth Goddess an ‘offence to God’, not commenting on what the creator might think of the rest of St Austell. Another resident thought it more appropriate to commemorate a local hero, such as soldier Harry Billinge, who opened a hairdressers in Cornwall after WWII.
The comments on a Daily Mail article about the sculpture are a joy to read, so stupid and clichéd are they*: every comment with hundreds of likes consists of either ‘my five-year-old could do it better’, ‘rubbish’ or ‘what a waste of money’. Anyone who says they like it, or it didn’t cost taxpayers anything (which it didn’t) gets a barrage of thumbs down.
The sculpture and the art trail definitely gets a thumbs up from me, some well-needed colour and joy in a grey concrete town.
Three Ceramic Paintings by Simon Bayliss, part of the art trail in St Austell. I love his Merman of Zennor teapot and want one.
*So much so it’s hard to believe they’re genuine comments and not DM journalists posing as ‘NIMBY Boomers’. Though a couple are truly inspired: what the hell does ‘Get the soap dodger to tear it down because kebabs were eaten by the oppressors’ even mean?