(1937 – )
Buoyed up by yesterday’s statue unveiling in south Wales, I take a detour home via north Wales. I’m in the country anyway, so why not saunter along the west coast and take in a Shirley Bassey sculpture while I can?
I take the jaunt along the A487, happily coasting behind Owen Jones’ Landscape Gardener’s truck. His vehicle design features successful project pictures and lists his contact details. By the time he turns off some 100 miles later I feel I know him well enough to do his accounts.
Born in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Shirley began performing as a teenager in 1953. By 1959 she was the first Welsh person to get a number one hit in the UK Singles Chart and over the next 40 years has accumulated 27 hits in the Top 40 Charts and sold over 140 million records worldwide. She is the only singer who has recorded more than one James Bond film theme song (bonus points if you can name all three).
The sculpture took artist Marc Rees around 600 hours to create, and is based on Queen Boudicca, complete with power pose, spear and a hollow heart symbolising art as the beating heart of the community.
I park up at the castle on a sleepy Sunday morning to the spot where Shirley should be. Accept she isn’t there. I walk round its perimeter in case I have mistaken the balcony and approach a few strangers for direction, all to be met with a blank. When the castle opens, I finally get somewhere when the receptionist tells me that the sculptor was only temporary and hadn’t been there for years.
David Lloyd George may well shake his fist.
And so this weekend we gained a statue and lost a statue. Maybe the statue will turn up again one day. And if it is sitting in your back garden or your own castle, drop me a line…
WomenstatuesUK 