Sunday 13 November 2011

The art of soccer

My glamorous assistant is not just a good sculptor, he is also an utterly obsessed football fanatic.

This papier mache head was a summer project for all the kids in his daughter's primary school, who all helped to make it in the playground outside the main building. In case you don't recognise it, it is a six-foot + high depiction of the famous English footballer, Wayne Rooney, but it has been outside for the whole of the autumn now, and is starting to fall apart.

When it was first completed, the head would gently wobble and sway in the wind, because the base of the neck is hinged and weighted with a simple pendulum. All the paper involved in it's making are the football sections of the sports pages of newspapers, which he avidly reads every day.

He was telling me the other day that Wayne Rooney's much publicised recent hair-transplant has coincided with the sale of genuine grass seed taken from the pitch of the Arsenal Football ground, and he thought very seriously (lol!) about buying some and sowing it into the bald scalp of his paper Rooney.

Like I say, he is football mad, so he must be overjoyed that the season is just beginning here in Britain.



5 comments:

  1. Just beginning? I din't think it had bloody stopped.

    I prefer Mrs Rooney!

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  2. 'din't' is NOT an attempt at WR's regional accent; just a typing error.

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  3. That is brilliant Tom.....I bet all of the children loved doing that project.
    My friend is a potter and goes into infant and primary schools and they all make clay tiles, which are then put together to make a picture, which is apt to the school, and, once fired, they are cemented to a board and hung in the school gardens. The children love doing it so, I think that we can say that art is alive and well.....at least for the younger children.
    How are you feeling ?

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  4. While in school, we performed Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood. We had to make enormous papier maché animal heads, so I can appreciate the work that went into Rooney's head. I think sewing grass for his head would be magic.

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  5. Reminds me of that last scene in 'Planet of the Apes'...

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