On The Scary Art at UEA Lake
What makes the sculpture trail at University of East Anglia scary
I’m at UEA. It’s cold (December 7th). I just walked past Laurence Edward’s Man of Stones (2019) and the 19 other sculptures on the trail that map the University of East Anglia’s lake. And now I’m sitting on a bench.
I only knew Edward’s newest feat was here because I’d seen it debated in the EADP news. Alarming art makes headlines, and they read “It’ll Scare People To Death”. Tall (8ft), wide (difficult to hug) and motionless, this huge figure looks as though he’s just crawled out of the Norfolk broads, slowly, and with great difficulty. Bronze stones and foliage drip from his frame, heavy and shiny. His face is tired. Tortured. He looks out, understanding the horrors of the world. Rather than dramatically frame him, the muted lakeside foliage behind him acts as camouflage; he becomes a lingerer, loitering, lurking, just out of your peripheral. You can picture a misty morning dog walker clocking his silhouette and their scream, ripping across the placid lake. The mud around him has more traffic than the rest of the trail, as though people fight to get past, leaving deep sloppy footprints in their wake.
It speaks volumes that complaints don’t fly in about the gangly apocalyptic hen-hybrids treading the shores of the lake. (Elisabeth Frink, Mirage I and Mirage II, 1969). Nor the embryonic forms of Henry Moore, whose limbs are formless and vague like Tolkein’s orcs in their sacs of slime, dug from the earth in Lord Of The Rings; nor the great Taitlin Tower (1919) boasting dreams of communism - proposed as a headquarters for the communist revolution (in sight it lunges like a red dagger threatening the sleek, metal torso of the Sainsbury Centre).
No; all of these things are just sculptures to us. We can write them off. What scares us about the Man of Stones is who he is. A mirror. We know the horrors of man. Tasted stories of torture and malice. Lived wars and genocides. Large parts of our own history make us blush, wince and squirm.
The scariest thing we can conjure, worse than beasts and aliens, is a powerful human.
