Day Four (2)

After doing the village on Day Four I then whizzed over to the other side of the Forest Road tracks to see where Michael Holland had been pointing his camera. Art Trail regulars will all be aware of ‘Privet View’ in which Michael’s photographs are hung (or strung) along the two sides of privet hedge around his garden. As always, there was a big mix of subjects and perspectives but I was really struck by the insects. I am a big insect fan and am particularly fascinated by spiders so getting up close and personal with the local wildlife was great.

On way back up Mersey Road I passed by Virginia Cucchi’s house. Unfortunately it wasn’t a day when her whole show was installed but the front window was still full of images and it did look good. For more pics here's a link to her own photos and for more info about her Trail installation in general please click here.

Next and final stop for day five was to see the project of other Art Council Commission awardee, Della Rees. The house next to the fire station on Forest Road is the birthplace of William Morris and Della did a project at this venue last year in relation to its famous former occupant.

She explained her project and how the whole thing unfolded in an earlier post on the blog but I still found it hard to imagine exactly how it would look. So suddenly seeing a beautifully blue patterned house emerging out of the general griminess as I cycled down that end of Forest Road was amazing. From a distance the house looks so delicate, almost like it’s made of china, but close up you can see the paper curving over the telephone wires and the odd nail sticking out of the wall. Apart from that the paper looks so smooth and the house seems like something from a fairy tale or just a most beautifully gift wrapped very large present.

One of the fire station staff who was in the house when I was there came out for a chat. He said that there had been some concern about how weatherproof the project would be so before the Trail, the paper was applied on the back wall of the house to test its durability. It obviously worked very well and given that the weather this week has been so amazingly good I’m sure the paper could probably stay up there for quite a long time. I am not sure whether the wrapping will just be left to slowly fade and peel after the Trail or will actually be removed. Whatever happens this project is definitely a much more stylish and attractive way of wrapping a building than anything Christo ever did!