Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Stag Duties






A few of us have been largely familiarising ourselves with Terry Urbahn's The Sacred Hart in an effort to become good Auckland Festival attendants. The installation is open from 10am-10pm which means that those of us doing night shifts have had an interesting time observing in-church happenings such as bellringing rehearsals and 'Graham' the homeless man who always has a plethora of tea mugs that he likes to leave peppered around St. Matts.

Tidbits:

- The Stag for this installation isn't the original (as it was in the Govett Brewster) but instead, a mould of the original with a human leg. Story goes that the original stag used to have only three legs, but one day, someone replaced it with a leg that according to Urbahn, looked like that of a human. This rumour spread like wildfire and it wasn't until Urbahn went up to inspect the stag a few years back, that he realised he was completely wrong. It was merely a badly whittled stag leg. His bad.

- The stained glass window looking down onto the installation was designed by Phillip Trusttum, Urbahn's tutor back at Ilam.


- A video showing the movements of the stag's shadow on the revolving plinth. Urbahn commented on the turning as a way of showing a passage of time. We noticed, when lit at the right angles, the stag turned into a faux sun-dial. How appropriate.



While we were closing up tonight, we had a slightly frazzled girl rush in carrying a parrot on her shoulder. Only in the City.

- Agnes

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