Sculptures at Gibbs Farm

What a lovely day! A few months ago, after two years of trying, I finally got four tickets to visit this awesome place. It is free to visit but you have to book a place.

We had to get up a bit earlier than I'm accustomed to , needing to leave at 7.15am, but the morning was a very beautiful one.

 It was a lovely day, with just enough cloud to be interesting, and to keep us from being too hot. We were joined by friends from down the road, Paulina and Neil.

lan Gibb's 'Farm' is an amazing setting for oversize sculptures. 

 The 'farm' is mowed by pretty serious mowers, rather than grazed.

 Although there are a few animals, they are not, in the main, farm animals as we think of them.  Buffalo, emu, deer, alpaca, oxen, coloured sheep and goats.....

This giraffe is a sculpture though.

This, one of my two favourites, Horizons by Neil Dawson, is amazing. I thought that when I saw it,  it would look real, but no. In real life, even up close, it still looks like someone drew in on the landscape. Totally fucked with my head, and I kept blinking, trying to clear my vision. Wonderful.

 My other favourite was Anish Kapoor's Dismemberment

And here with Len Lye's Wind Wand in the background.

Paulina and I missed this one because, so Mac says, we were too busy talking. Meh - just makes for a good excuse to go back another time.
Some of the others, and some views of the land: photos really can't give much idea of the scale of these art works.

Richard Serra's Te Tuhirangi Contour is pretty impressive. It's about tracing the contour of the land, and 'collects the volume of the land', but to me it was a wall, but even though it's ends were free, it still seemed to have been effective, because we saw no Mexicans. Which was, perhaps, a shame.

 All in all, great art, great company, great day. I'll be back.