KINGS PLACE SCULPTURE TRAIL
Near Kings Cross – at York Way, to be exact - tucked away by Regent’s Canal is a complex which offers the Pangolin Gallery, music venues, cafes and bars. And a sculpture trail.
You are looking at Dark Line , one of 24 sculptures which grace the banks of the Canal and invite you to wander through to meet work by very famous and by not-so-famous sculptors.
Dark Line seems to spring gracefully up into its space. It’s full of paradoxes. It's slender yet tough; solid, but a fissure runs down its body; sharp and precise but with intricate, delicate surface texture; as still as a standing stone yet it draws its shape in the shadow on the floor. As you follow the trail you see it against the changing vistas of water and sky; massive buildings and cosy chairs; inside and outside.
The art critic Richard Cork wrote recently that on the wall of the artist’s studio hang the words of the psychoanalytic theorist D,W,Winnicott: ‘it is in the space between inner and outer worlds - which is also the space between people, the transitional space - that intimate relationships and creativity occur’. Anthropologists and theologians talk of ’liminal space’, from the Latin word meaning ‘threshold’, a place betwixt and between, where new things happen. I think they’re talking about the same thing.
In about 1996 I was given three small glass pyramids by Ann Christopher as a gift from my family. The certificates of authenticity read ‘The precise cut lines form a taught (sic) web containing the clear inner space of the glass pyramid’. The sides are patterned with etching but through the clear glass I experience an echo of a child’s delight in the mystery of being able to see inside a solid object. As you do with a glass marble.
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