It’d be hard to miss a 20-foot high sculpture of giant clasped hands standing in front of you, but that is exactly what a number of people walking along a path at Salisbury Cathedral failed to see.
Artist Sophie Ryder probably didn’t mean for her artwork, 20 feet high and made from steel wire and called “The Kiss,” to become an obstacle, or for that matter, a teachable moment in people lives. But her artwork is causing bruises from some oblivious pedestrians.
The BBC is reporting that just one day after the work was installed on a pathway outside the Cathedral, it started causing sore heads. People who were more intent on texting instead of looking where they were going while they walked were colliding with the sculpture.
Sadly, it is the sculpture that is paying the price for people’s carelessness, though, says ArtNet News. “We had to move ‘the kiss’ because people were walking through texting and said they bumped their heads! Oh well!!” Ryder wrote on Facebook this week. The sculpture had been in place for only a few days.
One of Ryder’s fans used a Scottish expression meaning “a stupid or ineffectual person,” when she responded to the Facebook post, replying, “Sorry some people are complete numpties.”
“Relationships: An exhibition by Sophie Ryder,” is being curated by Jacquiline Creswell, the Cathedral’s visual arts advisor. The exhibition includes figures of Minotaurs and another human-animal hybrid, namely the “lady hare,” which depicts a large, crouched female form with the head of a rabbit.
It is sort of ironic that the exhibit is supposed to “challenge us to consider how we interact with each other and our own loved ones,” because it seems, says the Telegraph, that many of the public are in their own little worlds, attached by an umbilical cord to an electronic device that has taken over their lives, making them incapable of interacting with anything or anybody.
Ryder was born in London in 1963 and studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts. She has had exhibitions in a number of venues, including Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Imago Galleries in California, and the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
