Standing in Cunard Place in the east of the City is Jesse Pollock’s ‘The Granary’. The installation will catch your eye. Its coppery red and oranges and golds make a striking contrast with the stone-grey offices behind. Cunard Place is made up of smooth surfaces with its huge expanse of flat pavement carried upwards by the flat surfaces of the restrained and dull office blocks. It is an uninviting, cold space suddenly given a very large injection of colour.
The work, as the name suggests, takes its inspiration from grain stores in Kent, which look like large wooden sheds sitting on columns of concrete mushrooms, designed to deter rodents. This granary though, also looks like a giant jewel box, an enamelled medieval reliquary casket, or a cottage from the Brothers Grimm. The beaten and distorted metallic sides give it a dream-like quality, in a place which normally does nothing but discourage the use of imagination.
‘The Granary’ is part of ‘Sculpture in the City’, the eleventh iteration of what was, until recently interrupted, an annual event. Twenty artworks are on display until the Spring.
Keep an eye out for this year’s exhibits. Follow the trail, or visit sculptureinthecity.org.uk.
