Rickey Statue

Introduction

Since 1994, Glasgow City Council had held a significant piece of kinetic art in storage. It was created by George Rickey, a world-renowned American Artist with strong Glasgow connections.

The work is known as Three Right Angles Horizontal and was bought from the Scottish Sculpture Trust in 1991. Along with Four L's Excentric (Glasgow Cross), which was gifted by the sculptor to the city at the same time, it was exhibited in Festival Park, which opened in 1994. Both sculptures were thereafter removed from the park and placed in storage.

The smaller of the two pieces was returned to the Rickey Estate following the sculptor's death in 2002, but the city stored Three Right Angles Horizontal in a lock proof container in the Bellahouston Park depot, and has recently relocated the parts to East Kilbride. Recently, Fiona Sinclair, a conservation-accredited architect, was commissioned to research the history of the sculpture and the background to its being placed in storage. With the assistance of Murray Grigor, film-maker and friend of George Rickey; Paul Cosgrove, Head of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art; Glasgow School of Art's Archives Department; and the National Library of Scotland (in whose Special Collections Department are the full records of the Scottish Sculpture Trust), the following facts emerged...

Re-dressing the balance: Myth and mis-representation

While it makes for an intriguing tale, the disappearance of two kinetic sculptures gifted to the city of Glasgow by George Rickey in 1991 is a story frequently recounted with less attention to fact than fable. It is true that two stainless steel sculptures by the artist were indeed dismantled, and for a period their existence known to only a few, but they were not stolen nor sold for scrap, and while one has been returned to the sculptor's country of birth, the other - designed to be mounted in a pool of water - has a new home in the boating pond created in Queen's Park at the close of the C19.

Many of Glasgow's free-standing sculptures (and a few of its buildings) have been moved successfully from one site to another (and some after a prolonged period of absence), so the re-emergence of Three Right Angles Horizontal is simply part of a pattern of civic space re-invention that the city embarks on from time to time.

For some years now Glasgow City Council has been engaged in the restoration of a number of the principal monuments, built features and statuary in its public parks, squares and spaces, and the re-assembly of Rickey's sculpture forms part of this ongoing initiative. At Queen's Park, where there is less in the way of public art than in the city's other large parks (but where there is a suitably deep pond), the sculpture can at last find a home for the foreseeable future.

George Rickey 1907 - 2002

Born in Indiana, USA, Rickey came to Scotland with his family in 1913, staying first at the Queen's Hotel in Helensburgh (built by Henry Bell, the town's first Provost, and inventor of the paddle steamer Comet), and then at Rockfort, a Tudor-revival villa perched on the water's edge, close to Craigendoran, and in the grounds of which sat a folly reputedly used as a resting place for coffins landed by water at the jetty. Rickey would later tell of how he frequently saw John Logie Baird walking through town, and how he played with the Blackie children at Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House. Chief among his early memories was visiting the Art Gallery and Museum at Kelvingrove in Glasgow to study the model ships (and of electrocuting himself by dismantling a light-switch at one or another of Miss Cranston's tea-rooms).

At the age of eighteen, Rickey joined the workforce at Singers in Clydebank (where his father was a mechanical engineer), assembling sewing machine stands by way of practical experience and being taught to drive by the factory chauffeur. At first intending to follow both father and grandfather into engineering, Rickey instead studied history at Balliol College in Oxford, attending classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the Ashmolean Museum and graduating in 1929. From England, he travelled to Paris, where he pursued a career as an artist, leaving France for Massachusetts (where he taught English and European history), then Germany, England, New York City and Spain.

In 1942 Rickey was drafted into the US Army Air Corps, serving as a teacher and aircraft mechanic, and returning to his first love of engineering by beginning to construct sculptures using scrap metal available at the army base at Laredo in Texas.

Finally, at the age of forty-two, after nearly twenty years as an artist and teacher, he began to concentrate on the medium of sculpture, first building mobiles in glass and then metal, and from there progressing onto standing structures using wires and pivots.

Significant commissions and exhibitions in Hawaii, Japan, Zurich, Amsterdam, Germany and America occupied Rickey before he next returned to Scotland in 1981.

In the interim he had established the Hand Hollow Foundation at Chatham, where artists could meet as part of a summer school, and which was visited in time by Shettleston-born artist George Wyllie, who would become a friend and fan. Out of Rickey's 1981 visit grew plans to create a major anniversary exhibition of completed sculptures and maquettes on the banks of the River Clyde, the installation being opened in June 1982 to great acclaim. Chief among the exhibits (albeit on dry land, not water) was Three Right Angles Horizontal, a second version of which was exhibited the following year in Munich as part of the International Garden Festival there.

In 1991 a further, brief visit to Glasgow was made until finally, in 1996, Rickey returned to the city to receive the Lord Provost's Award for Service to the Visual Arts. This, in the year Glasgow hosted the Festival of Visual Arts. In 1998, at the age of ninety-one, and four years after establishing the George Rickey Foundation, the artist returned on a visit to Helensburgh where he had spent his childhood years. Gifting Five Open Rectanglesto the National Trust for Scotland (by then owners of Mackintosh's Hill House) he also gifted Triple L Excentricto the Maggie's Centre in Edinburgh in memory of Maggie Keswick Jencks (whose father had been a patron).

By 2001, his health failing, Rickey established a small studio in Minnesota, dying there in July 2002 at the age of ninety-five. A memorial was held to honour his life and contribution to the world of art at New York's Guggenheim Museum later that year.

Festival and Fakelore 

George Rickey greatly appreciated the opportunity to exhibit his work in Glasgow, and by way of thanks gifted the plywood version of Three Right Angles Horizontal to the Scottish Sculpture Trust. The organisation had created the Highland Sculpture Park at Landmark (near Carrbridge) in 1978, and saw an opportunity to display the sculpture in the pond adjacent to the visitor centre.

By November 1983 it had been delivered from Yorkshire and installed in its countryside setting: photographs were immediately dispatched to Rickey who was already hard at work creating a maquette for what was initially called Papal Cross but became known as Glasgow Cross. Lord Provost Michael Kelly, having identified a better site on Yorkhill Quay, was still anxious that Glasgow commemorate the 1982 visit to the city by Pope John Paul II, and in late 1983 the Scottish Sculpture Trust took possession of a model illustrating the form such a tribute might take. Presenting it to Glasgow District Council as a "quadruple L gyratory construction (which) ranges through a multitude of configurations from a cross to a saltire to the grid of the tartan", the Trust also indicated that the cost of the full-sized version would be in the order of £100,000. Unsurprisingly, the idea was quietly shelved and the maquette returned to America in 1984. Rickey estimated that Three Right Angles Horizontal might be worth as much as $275,000 once complete, and suggested that the Trust offer their version to the city for purchase, along with his first (artist's) edition of Glasgow Cross (properly known as Four L's Excentric), which he would sell for a third of its market value.

Accordingly, Three Right Angles Horizontal was transferred to the Glasgow Sculpture Studios in 1991 where Rickey supervised the final pouring of molten lead into the counterweight boxes and gave the new stainless steel arms his signature burnish.

Furthermore, he reimbursed the Scottish Sculpture Trust their original outlay on the manufacture. After much negotiation, on 5 November 1991, a Civic Reception was held in Rickey's honour, and one week later the Town Clerk's office confirmed an offer of £35,000 to the Scottish Sculpture Trust for Three Right Angles Horizontal, and accepted the generous gift by George Rickey of Four L's Excentric (Glasgow Cross).

Festival Park opened on 8 May 1994. By all accounts, the occasion was a huge success, and both Three Right Angles Horizontaland Four L's Excentric were prominently displayed. Simple boulder cairns of gabbro rock were placed close to the sculptures, with stainless steel plaques supplying the titles of the pieces, the date of design and the sculptor's name. They were recorded as belonging to Glasgow Museums. Within less than twenty-four hours, the decision was taken to "immobilise" Three Right Angles Horizontaland by 8 June 1994 both sculptures had been removed off site. So shallow was the lochan that children had simply waded in and begun to clamber onto the sculpture's arms (there being no play equipment elsewhere in the park) and rather than address the problem creatively the city's knee-jerk reaction was to transport (some of) the parts to a yard.

Understandably, George Rickey was devastated. He heard from friends and colleagues as soon as the sculptures had been removed, and wrote to Julian Spalding, the Scottish Sculpture Trust, and even Lord Palumbo seeking assistance. By end 1994, no resolution was in sight, and in despair he wrote to the Editor of the Glasgow Herald asking what could be done to reinstate them "up and swinging". He noted, "I'm very unhappy about them lying in a corner. If Glasgow doesn't want them, let other people enjoy them." In June 1995, Rickey wrote to the Council's Chief Solicitor, suggesting that in return for the two sculptures held in storage he would gift another artwork to the city, and offered two from which the choice could be made. As far as anyone is aware, no response was ever received. One week later, a scathing article penned by Clare Henry, appeared in the Glasgow Herald under the heading "Scrappy Way to Handle Great Art". Along with Murray Grigor, Clare Henry had been instrumental in persuading George Rickey that Glasgow deserved a kinetic sculpture (or two), and felt passionately that the city, by placing the work in storage, had "messed it up". A photograph used to illustrate her article clearly showed Four L's Excentriclying on top of the dismantled parts of Three Right Angles Horizontal. Neither appeared to be damaged, but they were not in motion or on public display. Murray Grigor and George Wyllie had traced the sculptures to a Parks Department enclosure and succeeded in photographing them,subsequently creating a short film for Scottish Television entitled "Fakelore" in which they interviewed Pat Lally (by then Lord Provost) and also Julian Spalding.

Following the sculptor's death, Four L's Excentricwas returned to the George Rickey Estate (leaving the gabbro rock and plaque behind), and Three Right Angles Horizontal was placed in a secure container in Bellahouston Park.

Finding a site

Realistically, there are not many locations to which Three Right Angles Horizontal can be moved. It is designed to sit in water that is neither tidal nor subjected to a current (despite early sketch ideas by the sculptor), and it requires to be sited where it will be clearly visible to the passing public. In hindsight, it was naïve to imagine that Festival Park would be an appropriate location, given its relative isolation, the height of foliage around the park, and the shallowness of the lochan - barely deeper than a padding pool. Furthermore, in the absence of any other play equipment nearby, local children were bound to improvise.

The boating pond in the north-west corner of Queen's Park, however, meets the criteria best, in no small part down to the busyness of Pollokshaws Road (which is a major bus route), the number of tenement flats that overlook that part of the park, and the large expanse of water available. That the pond is adjacent to the road helps immeasurably in terms of passive supervision, but also maximises the potential for large numbers of Glaswegians to see the sculpture in the passing. Queen's Park is also something of a tabula rasain respect of artwork, allowing the introduction of a stainless steel kinetic sculpture to bring an added dimension to a landscape designed around views and vistas rather than set-pieces. Importantly, the absence of statuary and monuments elsewhere in the park will impart added significance to the installation. (The recent addition of a sculpted timber version of Clyde, mascot of the Commonwealth Games of 2014, brings doubtful artistic value, and consideration may have to be given to relocating this).

Sculpture Specifications

George Rickey reckoned that the plywood Three Right Angles Horizontal could be easily assembled by the equivalent of two men in a boat. The stainless steel version presents another scenario altogether - each arm weighs around 125kg, and the fully ballasted knuckles are 500kg each. In storage are the principal components of the sculpture: six stainless steel box arms 2450mm long, 350mm wide and 220mm high.

These were designed to be bolted to a counterweight knuckle in pairs, creating a right angle. The knuckles have 690mm long sides and rather narrow flanges onto which the arms are bolted into slots. Bolted on the underside of the knuckles were short steel spindles that rotated in a ball bearing mount. Two of the counterweight knuckle boxes have welded bases since it is known that they are full of molten lead poured in carefully to balance the weight of the arms. The third box is folded steel, so it is not clear how it was filled.

Only one triangular foot out of three survives (the shortest). The sculpture is designed to have the three right angles one slightly higher than the next, the height differential (which is a gap of around 100mm) created by having each 'L' supported on a hollow steel post welded to a triangular foot. The lengths of the posts were originally 1015mm, 710mm, and 405mm (3'4", 2'4" and 1'4"). The underside of the lowest 'L' was designed to sit 150mm (6") above water level, and the topside of the upper 'L' was around 950mm high above the water. In reality, very little of the sculpture sits under water (around 250mm), and at Festival Park, the foundation was clearly visible and had to be disguised with gravel.

The three triangular feet on plates were bolted to an RSJ assembly that created the outline of an equilateral triangle with sides of approximately 2775mm in length. This was itself bolted to a foundation using M16 expanding bolts. Rickey intended that there be three piles, one at each corner of the triangle, but at Festival Park a reinforced concrete foundation 4500mm square and 300mm deep was cast on the lochan floor. In deeper water, this will not be an option. Missing are the foundation and RSJ triangular base. Also missing are two of the spindles and their feet. Since drawings exist, re-manufacture will not be an issue (albeit the drawings are in the form of a faded fax). Installation will first require that the depth of the water in the pond be established, since this will determine the height of the three piled foundations.

© Fiona Sinclair, RIAS