When Christine was in Edinburgh several years ago, she heard about a nearby sculpture park called Jupiter Artland. It wasn’t yet open for the summer, and when she knew she would be in Glasgow this month, she excitedly bought tickets online. It was an easy walk from the local train station, she was told, and we could easily catch a train from Glasgow. So we arranged to spend a day there.
Getting to Jupiter Artland turned out to be an adventure. A conductor put us on the wrong train, which we only realized after it had left the station. When we finally got on the right train and alighted at the village of Kirknewton, there was no indication of which way to go. We walked into town, hoping to find someone who could explain the way. Christine did get directions, but they were a little vague. We walked across a pedestrian bridge over the railway and along a winding farm track. There was no sign of anything resembling a sculpture park, and I joked that the whole thing was a conceptual prank: there was no art except the walk into the country looking for the art.
The track ended in a busy highway and there, finally, was a sign: Jupiter Artland. We had arrived! First, though, we had to walk a narrow, nettle-lined path along the road, where we picked up hundreds of small black insects. I hope we brushed them all off and won’t be bringing some new pest back to Canada.
First, we ate lunch in the café, which was busy and loud. Our server was possessed by the spirit of Manuel from Fawlty Towers, reincarnated in the form of a young Scottish lass: nice but utterly incompetent. Then we walked out to see the sculptures.
The art, as often happens, turned the day around. There are some two dozen pieces, including three by Andy Goldsworthy, who might be Christine’s favourite artist. Many of the works were impossible to photograph because they appealed to senses other than vision: smell, hearing, touch. Others were too monumental to get in the frame. I should’ve stopped trying and just enjoyed the work, but I was thinking of this blog and the need to illustrate it.
I particularly liked Goldsworthy’s Stone House, a stone structure with a floor made of bedrock, which brings the natural world inside, and his Stone Coppice, in which stones left over from Stone House are balanced between coppiced trees. Anthony Gormley’s Firmament also stood out: a crouching figure made of corten bars through which one can see the sky. (It’s too big to photograph.) I liked Henry Castle’s Hare Hill as well, although I didn’t understand it. But I think the standouts were Christian Boltanski’s Animitas–hundreds of Japanese bells tinkling in the wind, which reproduce a map of the stars on the night Boltanski was born–and Tania Kovats’s Rivers, a boathouse with samples of water from 100 British rivers on shelves inside. There were many other works worth seeing: Jupiter Artland is worth a visit.
Christine wanted to catch the 15:51 train, so we took a cab to the station. The driver knew where Saskatchewan was; her friend had lived there, on a farm with llamas. Now we’re heading back to Glasgow for dinner at a restaurant specializing in food from southern India. Is there a dosa in my future? It’s a real possibility.
