Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Art is supposed to challenge us
What dogmatic opinions about the city’s statues! What stubborn views of what should be [Letters, Gazette, June 30]! If public art must mirror only the expected, we are all lost!
The proposed Marlowe statue is of a poet and artist. It will bring a quality of enigma to the cityscape.
Visitors will be confronted by a dynamic steel form that is undeniably human yet tentative towards our most characteristic aspect, the face.
Art rouses questions; it is not there to confirm dogma. Much better to view a statue and feel puzzled over your response than be bored, to have questions raised than remain in a coma of convention, better to stir a sense of the provisional, to rouse mystery and not dogmatic certainty.
Won’t the city gain from an artistic reminder that there is always an alternative?
Kevin Power
Mystole
■ In response to George Metcalfe’s letter [Gazette, June 30] about the proposed statue of Christopher Marlowe, it is sad to see his continued campaign in which he has promised to do all he can to prevent its installation.
His criticisms, however, were not expressed to the planning committee prior to their considering the application, and it went through without any opposition.
The proposal is supported unequivocally by our patron Lord Rowan Williams and King’s School where Marlowe was educated, and by many others in Canterbury. A maquette of the proposal is being widely displayed, and without exception receives enthusiastic support.
The aspect which seems to upset George the most is the sculptor’s proposal of a semi abstract figure of Marlowe expressing his unknown face at the age of his death by the leaves of a book, plus the fact that the statue will be constructed from mostly recycled steel and not the traditional bronze.
The method of construction proposed by our experienced sculptor Steven Portchmouth, similar to that used for his much loved Bull in Westgate Gardens, is unusual but will be a dynamic and vibrant enhancement to Clocktower Square. This is currently a neglected space, which will, with the statue, be immensely improved by trees proposed for its additional status as a Blitz Garden included in the city council’s Levelling Up Fund application.
We are sorry that we cannot satisfy George’s desire for a traditional bronze statue, of which there is already a plentiful supply in the city. Our intention is to provide a unique memorial to the unconventional and controversialist nature of Christopher Marlowe, whose intelligence and free spirit rebelled in a period of religious intolerance, and we are convinced our sculptor will produce that.
Dr Virginia Webb (chair) and Diana Holbrook RIBA (project manager) Christopher Marlowe Statue Committee