Big, bizarre and just

Jupiter Artland’s bold summer offerings are worth a visit plain potty

THE leaves are fresh on the trees, the swifts have finally made it to the shores of the Forth and there have been brief intimations of a “heatwave” (I use this term advisedly) – all of which heralds the annual opening of Jupiter Artland for the summer season. There is more celebration in the air than usual, as this is the venue’s tenth anniversary.

Jupiter Artland has been a resounding success, the creation of a Scottish outdoor sculpture park by private individuals with public intent – every school in Scotland is invited to visit Nicky and Robert Wilson’s venture for free in a go-getting education programme. And this year, Jupiter Artland is trying to even out the social selection that happens when entry prices exclude some from the grounds with Pay What You Want Mondays.

Jupiter’s raison d’etre is contemporary sculpture and each year it stages two series of exhibitions in the summer, with one permanent commission a year. Past commissions have included Pablo Bronstein’s Gothic-Chinese pavilion The Rose Walk, Tania Kovat’s evocative water bottle-filled boathouse Rivers and Sara Barker’s ephemeral Separation in the Evening. With a swimming pool from Joana Vasconcelos – who takes over all the temporary exhibition spaces this summer – in the making for next year, you could be forgiven for thinking that they might be running out of space.

Certainly if all the works were as monumental as Phyllida Barlow’s Quarry, this year’s major permanent commission, one might start to worry. Part of the beauty of Jupiter is the expansive woody grounds with idyllic walks and sculptural works secreted throughout. Barlow’s works might be tucked away in a clearing, surrounded by tall trees, but once you spot them you couldn’t accuse them of standing back while others pushed themselves forward.

Barlow is no stranger to large-scale, not least her superb Tate Britain installation Dock, which filled the Duveen Galleries with a vast structure of scaffolding, pallets and polystyrene. Now in her 70s, she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year. Jupiter is her first outdoors commission. Quarry is a play on words looming at vast scale among the canopy, a short stroll from the Charles Jencks Lifeforms. Her monumental forms comprise two vast paint-spattered columns topped by gravity-defying metal hoops, like jaunty hats or angular quoits or an alien interpretation of a tree, and a stone-effect staging of steps, part Dartmoor tor, part ancient temple stairway. The hoops, if that is the word – and I strongly feel it is not – are precarious and weighty-looking things, made of rusting steel, defying gravity and all engineering good practice. As such they are ominous, inducing a certain nervousness, even as they pick out the sky like oversized and bent bubble blowers.

The “steps” too, are disconcerting things, broodingly monumental, teeteringly steep, desperately inviting for a scramble and yet not offering any easy suggestions for the initial leg-up (although, be warned, your children will have suggestions). The whole is like a bizarre quasi-religious relic of both past and future civilisations, a dumped theatrical set, a place of mythic ritual, of quarries dragged in among the real and fabricated trees, an unsettling meditation on mass and balance and instinct, with added graffiti.

Equally enamoured of a splash of bright, although the brights are the

IMAGES BY ANNA KUNST COURTESY JUPITER ARTLAND Above: Joana Vasconcelos with Carmen Miranda and, left, large stuffed crochet form Far left: Quarry with Phyllida Barlow