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| The laic sculptor of Ano Korakiana at work by Jan Bowman |
A catalogue on the internet for Aristeidis Metallinos` Ο Αριστείδης Μεταλληνός I left Ano Korakiana in June telling Angeliki, his grand-daughter, that by September I would bring her a rough draft - on paper.
Back in England, talking to several curators of art galleries, I came away convinced that what was needed was not a hard copy - yet. I asked my son, Richard, to design a website. Yesterday he showed me his draft for a front page...
...but to get it right "You have to have high quality photo's of each sculpture.
"Can you come to Corfu?"
"Yeah"
Richard will bring his camera to the museum in October. I hope he can work through the works not already photographed by Rob Groove who may be able to do more.
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| The artist creating his work - 1984, cat 190, stone 74 x 69cm (photo: Rob Groove) |
"Hm? Can you bring your own lights?"
"Maybe. Can't you find some in Corfu?"
"Maybe. I can let you know."
"I guess we'll need to photograph about 50 to 60 pieces a day. Can they be moved?"
I imagine doing this vital process the same way Angeliki, Lin and I with help from her parents worked up the draft catalogue we made in May, listing and numbering each piece with measurements and whether it's stone or marble.
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| Lin and Angeliki working on the catalogue |
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| A sample of Tassos' images of the carvings |
There are the lists made 10 years ago by Angeliki M, in Greek and English, recording the inscriptions on each work. Now all pieces in the collection are renumbered - chronologically - these words need to be digitised and linked to each new picture, bot for their explanatory value and to ensure identification.
Letter to Angeliki M: Αγαπητοί Αγγελική. Linda and I send love and best wishes to your family and hope you are all well. I have attached letters to me from Eurydice Antzoulatou-Retsila who knows as much as anyone outside Ano Korakiana about your grandfather. She is happy to write another article for the ‘catalogue’ we are working on about Aristeidis Metallinos. She retires from her university in the Peloponnese this month and she will be coming to Corfu, where she also worked, to visit friends and, she hopes, to visit you, your family and the museum when she is here. My son Richard Baddeley is working on a website about the sculptor. This website will record all the works with photographs of each carving. My son says that he needs high quality photographs like those created by our friend Rob Groove from Ipsos who visited the museum this May to make an image of ‘The Saint of Preveza’ for Richard Pine’s book about Greece which will be published in October. Our son will be coming to Corfu for a week in order - with yours and your family’s permission - to take high quality photographs for the Aristeidis Metallinos catalogue which he will be putting on the website catalogue he has started to design. After we returned to England in June I asked several museum and art gallery curators about our plan to publish a catalogue. They confidently advised me that it would be far better to have a web-based catalogue containing the artist’s work and articles about him. The advantage of this is that we can have swift free access across the world to Aristeidis’ works. The website can include texts including ones by Eurydice Antzοulatοu-Retsila, by your father and by me and you. We can also include video clips and sound recordings in English and Greek that can be accessed with a click of a computer key. People with smart phones can find out about the sculptor. A web-based catalogue has the additional advantage that it can be easily re-edited as new knowledge about your grandfather or more detailed images become available. I hope you will not be disappointed that I am not coming back to Corfu with a ‘book’, but I am now convinced that an Aristeidis Metallinos website is the best way forward in bringing the artist to a larger audience, and certainly does not preclude a book type catalogue. If a ‘hard-copy’ catalogue is wanted for a particular exhibition of the sculptor’s work at some time in the future, this can be constructed from data in pictures and words from the internet. We are looking forward so much to being back in the village and to seeing our friends again. I don’t know exactly when Eurydice arrives on the island but as you see – in the attached letters - I have given her details of how to contact you. I hope she will be welcome in Ano Korakiana. The work I am currently involved with is writing the English and Greek words on each of the sculptures....
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| First page of 15 pages - spaces await recording of transcriptions and, where needed, explanatory notes |
The Scops owl Metallinos carved on a stone plaque fixed to the front of his house, displaying his initials, and holding a builder's trowel and a sculptor's hammer, is dated the year he made the transition from builder to sculptor, depicting in stone and marble a unique record of a fast changing pastoral economy, emphasising the primacy of the family, village institutions and traditional customs, yet mingling with this account of Greek folklore, works that are στοιχεία ερωτικά, σκωπτικά και πολιτικά ανατρεπτικά...erotic, ribald and subversively political.
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I planted parsnip seedlings, germinated in March on a wet kitchen towel at home then planted them out on the plot inside cardboard tubes to help them stay straight and not divide. Since July I've been enjoying them as soup, roasted and boiled. Late August, my friend Winnie gets my grandson's help pulling up another crop for the pot.
One of the most robust sources of happiness these last 9 months has been the fecundity of our allotment. Various actions define a turning point. For s start I did what just about anyone living in Handsworth starting with raw soil has to do - one way or another. I invested in several builders bags of black gold compost which I gradually mixed with the 'messy' soil I've been trying to work since mid-2010.
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| Andy of Valley Contractors delivering black gold compost to Plot 14 - July 2014 |
What is 'messy' soil? There's a question. This plot and others on the Victoria Jubilee are confusing in this respect. It presented itself to my spade, fork and mattock, as neither sandy, nor peat, nor clay nor chalky. It might have the character of silt soil. Where compost has been mixed in, it might be loam. Loam and silt contain elements of the others. Why is it tricky to define?
To go way back; in Triassic times all Britain was in the tropics, our area a vast shallow lake. Far more recently - between 100,000 and 12,000 years ago...
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| Birmingham is about where ''e' is at the end of 'Northern Ice' |
... the land was buried beneath 3000 metres of ice. The climate was like that at the North Pole now. Slow-moving sheets of ice ground the tops from the Welsh Mountains and the great glaciers pushed great masses of earth and broken stone across the clay plain. In huge lakes blocked in by ice barriers a mile high, gales blew the water into mighty waves, which pounded the rocks into smooth gravel. When the great thaw came, this rubble was left strewn over the landscape forming an uneven, fairly continuous layer known as glacial drift, composed of water-worn pebbles mixed with sand and clay with a few larger boulders...
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| Winnie's stone garden - 'water worm pebbles' ground by glacial drift |
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| A typical collection of glacier and water-worn stones mixed with more recent rubble dug from the plot |
The same account of local geology goes on to say that the local 'topsoil is porous and acidic, unsuitable for agriculture...its natural cover was light woodland and heath.' This suggests that anyone who's used this land for growing vegetables has needed to improve their soil. I'm confident that the soil on the original Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA) - private land - had been undergoing steady improvement for near a century from the time working men started using land given them by the church at the end of the 19th century. It must have been dug, manured and composted for decades.
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| The Victoria Jubilee Allotments, sold by their owners to a developer, who got planning permission to build in 2004 |
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| The old Victoria Jubilee Allotments were accessed by country lanes (photo: Luke Unsworth 2004) |
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| Google map now - the unfinished playing fields and the new housing around Victoriana Way were once all allotments |
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| In 2005 the old VJA was being prepared for new allotments, playing fields and houses (photo: Luke Unsworth) |
...then a large cavity was dug in the ground beneath the smaller area reserved under a S106A. It was deep enough to almost hide the diggers involved...
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| 2004 Landscaping on the VJA site |
...and show the start of the deep sandy muddy glacial drift deposit that runs so close to the surface. Why such a large hole? Why did the developer need to create such a space? Was some of the excavated earth trucked from the site? I suspect this was all about major re-landscaping of the whole site with earth from one part being moved to other part - including the laying out of level playing fields to the south where the land had sloped gently down to the park. The original geology is confused. I didn't see it happen but my guess is that this cavity - under my present plot - was refilled from gradings elsewhere on the VJA site over which earth mixed with all left on the surface of the original VJA site was re-spread across the new site...
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| The new plots being laid out on the VJA |
On 10th June applicants signed up for their plots. Linda and I chose one overlooking Handsworth Park.
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| Signing up for our plot (photo: Richard Baddeley) |
I started work - innocent and ignorant - on preparing our new cherished hard-won plot.
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| Summer 2010 |
The earth was dry, dusty, full of weeds, pebbles, stones and odds-and-ends that had been part of the furnishings of the previous plots that had been here - worked wood, plastic, metal brackets, wire, fragments of fabric, many coloured pieces of broken glass, bricks, rubble...
It was a start. I was carried forward, as I am now, by interest, enthusiasm for learning, excitement at the prospect of growing things, getting a shed, making Plot 14 into a place.
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| July 2015 ((photo: Richard Baddeley) |