Another Tuesday trip.

This time to Salisbury. I had noticed that there was an exhibition by Peter Eugene Ball in the Cathedral and as W. is never reluctant to visit Salisbury Cathedral, off we went.

We started off, as usual, with lunch at Salisbury Arts Centre. - good cafe with rather a nice Art Gallery attached. The current exhibition  is ‘Birdland: An Artist’s Imaginary Aviary’ – which could have been naff – but wasn’t. I particularly liked Mahali O’Hare’s deceptively simple canvases with almost stencil-like birds – there's one on the link – but Lizzie Sykes’ video installation of a magpie was fascinating to watch.

Then we wandered over to the Cathedral for the exhibition by Ball.  He uses driftwood or other pieces of weathered timber with bronze and other metals.

There were some secular pieces but although I’m not a Christian I preferred the religious ones – like a cross between medieval reliquaries and the Benin bronzes. The pieces looked completely at home in the setting of the Morning Chapel of the Cathedral, especially those set in the wall niches,

and the Madonna and Child in front of the altar. [I took lots of photos but the ones on his website are much better quality.]

 

 

 

 

 

Of course there are a lot of sculptures outside the Cathedral as well, like this one

 

 

 

 

 

and this rather worried looking gentleman who we were told was a fairly recent arrival.

 

 

 

 

 

On the way out of the Close afterwards I spotted some rather exuberant flowers.  I hadn’t realised before that petunias are scented – well, I think it was the petunias, there were quite a lot of other things there as well.

 

 

 

And when we got back to the car park I couldn’t resist this little fellow, masquerading as a fire hydrant.