Balls – Greenmeadows 2010
At the toilet block! Really! Oh, cricket balls. OK. Ball-spinning shapes like the yin and yang of the game of life. Greenmeadows Recreation Ground has a long-established use for cricket. Throwing those balls around gets very technical. Then there’s the scoring and the recording; now that’s a visual art in itself. Are you out or not out? Is that large ball back to front? Life can be difficult some days.
Thomas Marsden created neigbourhood unease back in the 1850s. He was the owner of Isel House and surrounding land, including that which is now Greenmeadows and he was considered pretty out there; keeping a gun beside his bed, he would wake in the mornings, open his upstairs window and take pot shots at the blackbirds. Trespassers beware! Thomas did not like people trespassing to steal his fruit and vegetables and have fun swimming in his stream and his early morning ritual probably kept many a schoolboy at bay.
The gun, as viewed down its double barrels is in the artwork, as is the first plane to land in Nelson, 11 November 1921, right here on Thomas’s land. He marched down from his house to his front field and told the bi-plane to “get off my land”, possibly fearing that the plane could have landed in his precious, park-like garden of growing trees, many of which he had raised from seed. I can understand this. We can thank Thomas for the Isel Park we have today, containing some very fine, old trees.
Light transforms the work at night.
