Axis
Morgan Jones 1988
Morgan Jones was born in Surrey in 1934 and moved to Christchurch, New Zealand in 1955. Although most of his output has been exhibited there throughout the decades since, in 1988 he found himself in Grizedale Forest. Jones himself takes up the tale:
"I was in the UK on a Queen Elizabeth II Art Council travel grant from New Zealand. I travelled up to the Lake District by train with my bike and cycled from Windermere to Grizedale. Bill Grant didn’t know me from Adam, but I was persuasive enough to convince him that Grizedale would benefit from something I could make. I left a maquette of ‘Axis’ with him made from slate. This is probably still somewhere, perhaps in a drawer.
Rather fortuitously I’d started to keep a diary the previous year - and still do - and so I’ve got a
reasonably accurate record of those ten or so days. A site was selected for me in a part of the forest named 'New South Wales' - when I asked why they’d named it this I was told it was because it was so far away. I bought a tent and camped somewhere near the forestry headquarters.
It seemed sacrilege but I was told to get the rocks for ‘Axis’ from a nearby wall. The sculpture was sited at the top of a slope adjacent to the wall and so I had to hire a two-stroke wheelbarrow to get the rocks up there. I was quite young at the time - fifty four - but I found this quite exhausting. I’d never attempted to lay a dry-stone structure before, so it wasn’t too long before I realised I needed help. Bill Grant put me in touch with a local stone mason. I’ve only recorded his first name - Mike - but it could possibly have been Mike Bowerback. He completed the job for me. While I was there I met another sculptor working in the forest - Joanna Hull."
Mike Bowerback's name pops up elsewhere in Grizedale lore (most notably in the building of 'Silurian Cant') so it's almost certainly him. In a neat touch, 'Axis' was designed to line up with the four points of the compass, and must be one of the least-seen sculptures in Grizedale's history, since it didn't last long, as Morgan explains:
"When I returned to New Zealand I spent 1989 as the Artist-in-Residence at the Dunedin Art School. I met my wife there and in November of that year we came back to the UK and lived in Canterbury for six months. At one stage we drove up to Grizedale and I took Pat to see my masterpiece. Unbelievably, it had started to disintegrate. This was only fifteen or so months after it had been built."
Since Andy Goldsworthy's 'Taking A Wall For A Walk' appeared in 1990, it seems likely that the stones from Axis were used for Goldsworthy's famous work, which is ironic given Morgan's initial reluctance to use the stones from a nearby wall. The spirit of 'Axis' lives on, however, a little closer to home:
"For (I suppose) sentimental reasons a second version of ‘Axis’ has been built in our garden. ‘Axis 2’ is a rather sanitised version of the original - almost suburban - because it is cemented together and has reinforcing throughout. A good excuse for this is because we have earthquakes."
There was one final twist in this tale when the maquette which Jones mentions turned up a few years ago at the headquarters of Grizedale Arts. Here's a picture of it sitting not in a drawer as Morgan predicted, but on a shelf. Which is close enough.
Despite being in his eighties, Morgan Jones is still going strong, winning Australia's prestigious Aqualand Sculpture Award in 2020 for his steel piece 'The Sun Also Rises', which was exhibited on Sydney's Bondi Beach as part of the 'Sculpture by the Sea' exhibition.