Last time I went to the sculpture park I got very wrapped up in the sculptures and spent a lot of time photographing them in a way that showcased sculptures and not the park. This time I wanted to concentrate on the park rather than individual sculptures. I loaded up my camera bag and took my wide-angle lens as well as my wide through mid lens, and my plan was not to tip the camera into portrait and to take much wider shots.
As has been documented, I hired a mobility scooter for the trip and took my gear into the park. The whole shoot was rather eventful, the park is not at all wheelchair friendly and the scooter got bogged down in the mud several times, I spent almost as much time fending off the mud and digging myself out of a wheel spinning hole as shooting images.
I only had a tiny part of the park that I could shoot with the scooter so the whole event was limited, they state on their website that it is not a wheelchair friendly place.
The second part of this was that I went on Christmas Eve, see my earlier rant on the weather, time pressure dictated the date of the visit as I had to shoot all of A5 and complete this A3 reshoot so my hands were tied, this meant that I was in the park with only two other groups of people after all who goes to a sculpture park in the middle of nowhere on Christmas Eve with a two-hour weather window? Have you noticed how bad the accuracy of the weather apps on your phone are, well on this day it was accurate to the minute I got back to the car and loaded the scooter just at the time the app said it would rain and as I reversed out of the car park it hammered down.
The point of that last part was that I could not shoot images with lots of people making the space a place, I did get a couple with people in but it remains to see if they make the edit or not.
Farnham Sculpture park is a part of the wooded area with a couple of lakes that have been turned into a gallery for sculptors and like all art galleries, people come to visit to enjoy the art, the primary purpose of the place is to sell sculptures and they have a significant international reputation with sculptures coming in from all over the world and being sold on to all corners of the globe. The dragon in the outset above was made in the Philipines and sold in Singapore. I believe that this location more than qualifies as a space that has been transformed into a place and since I have now visited several times, I feel a familiarity with the layout and location that make it much more of a place.
