a pilgrimage to see Ai Weiwei's Iron Tree, cast from found wood out of iron and bolted together;

a visceral beauty of something new and whole, different but carrying the echos of the lost, made from scattered parts

I love how the rust of the Iron Tree makes it more, well, tree-like. Corrosion is not always corruption. It feels a rejection of purity, that it can make whole, the rust is the final step in becoming a tree.... a sort of reverse Eden, perhaps.

here is the text on the plaque about Ai Weiwei, it's in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Also reminds me of Hong Kong's plastic Wishing Tree (the original bark and sap one was very sick due to the weight of all the wishes thrown onto it - wishes have to be attached to mandarins), what with being a non-wood tree and that's another landmark of great significance to me.

The other Ai Weiwei work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park was "Circle of Animals/ Zodiac Heads".

They're based on the bronze heads on a famous Yuanming Yuan foutain, the palace that burnt for three days and three nights in the Opium Wars. The infamously looted Summer Palace.

There is decidedly a playfulness to these heads. The rabbit is decidedly cute. And it's easy to be selfie-ing next to one's own sign. Which is fun.

But there's something.... violent about how they're on takes, all beheaded. Something almost fleshy about those stakes.

I suppose it's the knowledge that they're based on something that was violently looted, the loss of which remains a symbol of the century of humiliation, and now scattered into private collections.

There are various replicas and re-interpretations. https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2017/06/06/looted-bronze-summer-palace-statues-return-beijing-replicas

My feelings are fuzzier, less visceral than with the Iron Tree. Without the historical context, these animal heads feel playful. But the context does rather change everything to me.

Obviously this is all my interpretation. Please go to the park or go look up more pictures and have your own feelings about this art. Thats the point of art, after all.

and another thing, whilst I was definitely already thinking about going to see the Ai Weiwei installations were a pilgrimage, that it was behind a wrought iron gate, surrounded by yew trees in a graveyard and next to a chapel all added to that feeling

Damien Hirst's Myth, which is an already mundane looking unicorn with half the skin "off", apparently meant to demonstrate a sort of coporeality behind the fantastical but feel flat for me given how uninspiring the skin-on side is, & skin off side just not quite visceral enough.

The Coffin Jump, by Katrina Palmer

I loved the way the words revealed themselves as one approaches, this feeling that there is always more story, deeper, buried underneath, as phrases appear, they recontextualise the last and there is more meaning, yet something is still missing

It's a horse jump, by the way and given the speakers in the trees, I think at one point there was a whole performance with music here to give a richer (and arguably more specific) narrative.

Text on it reads:
INTO THE MIDDLE • ACROSS LOWERING FIELDS • WOMAN SAVES MAN
WOMAN RIDES OUT • IN NOTHING FLAT • CUT TO PIECES
MAN DIGS DOWN • INTO THE MID-HELL • ALL PARTS REARRANGED

And behind is the text: NOTHING SPECIAL HAPPENED HERE

It's very evocative but I didn't have quite enough context to put it together. My mind went mythic to Isis putting Osiris back together again and more broadly the "invisible" labour that women often undertake.