Big Art in Kirkcudbright 2011 - Days 1 and 2

This is the second year there has been a sculpture symposium in Kirkcudbright and this year's is bigger than last year's with, if my totting up is right, 11 sculptors. You can find my blogs for the last symposium here, here and here. Although there have been some initial problems in getting the stones moved, at least the weather has been very kind to us, so the sculptors have been able to get started on the stones just where they are.

Here are some of them sitting down by the harbour yesterday before they got started on them.

The first stone here is going to be worked on by Nigel Mullan. He intends to base his work on some local cup and ring markings.

This is his piece as it is at the end of today.

Alan Ward often works on sculptures with his wife Christine but today he's working on this alone (Christine will make an appearance shortly).

Here he is this morning shaping his rock.

This is to be worked on by Martha Quinn.

Google seemed a little reluctant to tell me about her website at first but it did eventually - it's here.

I would say it's from her rock that the first recognisable part has appeared this symposium. She has taken some of her inspiration from a piece of fishing net she found.

By this evening there were more knots.

This piece belongs to Eldon Guay, who has flown over from Canada for the symposium.

By the end of today it has started to take on some shape. I managed to find this piece by him on Flickr

Here are Nuala Early and Tom Allan, who was here last year, standing by the stone that they were working on today. I've been rather negligent and not taken a photo of how this was at the end of today, but those who seem glanced over today will get more attention in a day or so's time.

Ali Thomson, the only sculptor I haven't spoken to yet is working on this piece.

So far it's fairly been reduced in size and well on the way to being squared up.

Christine Ward, whose husband we met earlier, had already done a fair bit of work to her stone by the time I met her. She had been thinking about introducing a tartan pattern to it and has made a wee test piece for this.

Michelle de Bruin's slab was much smaller than everyone elses so she was able to get it into position without the aid of the forklift. She does a lot of lettering in her work as well many pieces based around natural history - have a look at her web site here.

Here she is drawing in the first line of the text of her work.....

.... and starting to carve.

The carving as it was this evening.

The text is to be made up of things she has seen that are connected in some way to Kirkcudbright. The gun in question is the Siller Gun which has been mentioned before on these pages. It can be found near the bottom of this blog.

Not mentioned so far, because they haven't started due to other commitments, are Peter Dowden and Andy Breen, who were both here last year. I'm sure they'll be appearing here in a few days time.