BIRDS

Looking a bit more closely at the birds, the first thing you notice would be that I’ve tried to get an idea of different moments of birds in flight - wings up, gliding, flapping, coming into land - so there’s the shape of the wings and the position of the birds … trying to get a different types of movement into the sculpture.

The other thing is, if you look a bit closer, you’ll notice the skin of the birds - the surface of the metal - is actually engraved with line drawings.

And these relate to the heritage of Poole. So looking closely up at the first bird (if you’re coming from town it will be the first bird up in the air near Poole’s RNLI), then you’ll see it’s covered in images of different types of boat.

You’re going back to the Iron Age logboat that is in Poole Museum, and carrying on through to the first lifeboats, and also a modern lifeboat that they are building at RNLI, going on to the across under its stomach. This is a Cockleshell canoe which was a stealth camouflage canoe used in the Second World War, that was made in Poole. And going across you’ve got a landing craft from the D-Day landings, and then to the tip of the wing nearer the park you’ve got the Sunseeker … I can’t remember which one it is, one of the Sunseeker yachts … which is also made in Poole.

So there’s a lot of detail on each bird. And more obvious perhaps, most of the birds have got glass insets in them as well, with designs that relate to the same sort of imagery that is etched onto the surface.