Whirligig

Alan Thornhill spent his formative years at the family home ‘Rotherwood’, built at the edge of Hesworth Common.

The installation has been made possible by the generosity of the current owners of Rotherwood and the Estate of Alan Thornhill.

Sculpture has no purpose but to, perhaps, arrest and enrichen our day through questions and wonder.

Alan Thornhill was often asked “But what IS it?” of his sculpture, to which he’d reply that he’d done the hard work and that now it was down to others to see what they projected on to it.

You can only like, dislike or remain unmoved by it, but it does join another 20 or so public works by Thornhill in the streets of London, Stroud, Oxford, Greenham Common and in collections like the National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish collections in Glasgow and Edinburgh. That casts Fittleworth even deeper into the nation’s cultural map and gives another personality to research should you find you want to know more about why he made works like Whirligig, originally worked with architectural clay elements that grew without preconceived ideas and often took a figurative final form.