Giant Willow Man needs small fortune to stop him fading away
He’s a popular landmark, but CAROLINE ABBOTT says the famous sculpture is showing his age
THE Willow Man, which for two decades has served as a welcome signal to M5 motorists heading down to Devon that they are almost there, is more than 20 years old and is looking far from his best. In fact, his head and arms are now little more than sticks.
The 40ft-high sculpture stands in a field to the west of the motorway, south of Junction 23, near Bridgwater in Somerset. It can also be seen from the Bristol to Exeter railway line.
The Willow Man has not been abandoned and left to simply rot away. There is a lot of public interest in him. It’s just that it will cost an enormous amount of money to fix him and future-proof him – probably at least £100,000.
Earlier this year, Somerset-based musician Barry Walsh wrote a song to highlight the sorry state of the beloved sculpture. The lyrics describe how the Willow Man is ‘crying, all the time’ as he watches cars go by. ‘Can you help the Willow Man or must he fade away?’ asks the song, explaining that money is needed to save him.
The Willow Man was commissioned by South West Arts and the landowners to mark the new millennium and celebrate the role of willow in the ecology and craft traditions of Somerset. The sculpture was made of black maul willow withies woven over a three-tonne steel frame by Serena de la Hey and was unveiled in September 2000.
The first Willow Man was burnt down in an arson attack in May 2001, but the sculpture was rebuilt by the same artist in October of the same year. A circular moat was excavated around it to prevent further attacks.
Sometimes called the Withy Man, or the Angel of the South, the Willow Man had a £20,000 ‘haircut’ in September 2006. It was thought that birds had been using the material for their nests.
In an interview with the WMN’s sister website DevonLive last week, Serena de la Hey said: “He was never meant to last more than three years, but has become a very important landmark and very successful as an art piece. He looks a bit knackered, but it creates quite a good conversation. He can’t sit there looking forlorn for too long. It makes me anxious because I’m supposed to be responsible for sorting it out. There have been so many setbacks – mostly financial and some political. Since lockdown, I’ve had various conversations with people and we were seriously looking at it – at how we can do what we wanted to do, but in a different way.
“It’s an organic material. It’s like dealing with a thatched roof: you can go on patching it for a long time and you have to constantly revisit it. The ambition is to make it more permanent without losing what it is. It’s an engineering project.
“I don’t know exactly how much it would cost, but I would say it would be 10 times, if not more, than what it cost to make 20 years ago, which was £10,000. It’s a lot more than people think.
“It’s a work in progress and there’s always a hope we will get somewhere, but it won’t be immediate. There’s a lot of local public interest to help move it on. I’ve had support from the landowner, but it will take more than one person to finance this. We have to work with the council and others and hope we get to a point where there’s some kind of breakthrough.”
Serena added that the area had become much more developed over the past 20 years. “Originally he was running through a big open space,” she said. “It has become a much more built-up area, which has changed the nature of the piece, which is interesting to me as an artist.”