Brighton Flint Grotto
The Flint Grotto is a sculpture garden, created on Brighton beach in the early 2000s by Rory McCormack, a local fisherman. McCormack is a self-taught artist, though he spent time in Canada working as a dry stone waller.[1]
The sculpture garden, which McCormack created quietly and without council permission, was first named The Flint Grotto in David Bramwell[2] and Tim Bick's Cheeky Guide to Brighton in 2016.[3]
Brighton guidebooks have labelled the Flint Grotto "outsider art".[4][3] Alexandra Loske describes the statues as "sturdy figures rightly likened to outsider art or Arte Povera. They are raw, unconventional and strangely moving, standing silently battered by wind, sun and water..." [5] In an interview for The Keeper's Project, McCormack told the artist David Clegg, "Outsider artist isn’t a bad term, it’s just not the best one. There should be something that fits the bill a bit better - a restless person, with itchy fingers who couldn’t help but keep going."[1]
McCormack built the grotto on one of the small plots of land on the beach, allocated by Brighton Council for fishermen to keep their boats, nets and equipment.[5] Over time, most plots were abandoned, until McCormack was the last fisherman in Brighton to keep his boat on the beach, now in a fenced off enclosure.[6]
McCormack began by creating a garden on his plot.[1] His first structure was a workbench to chop his catches onCite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page)., made from beach flints and decorated with shells. He followed this with a decorated arch and a series of statues, outsized blow-ups of existing small ancient figurines.[1] These include the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, the Neolithic 'Thinker' of Cernavoda in Romania,the bronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo Daro, four marble Cycladic figurines, including a harp player and an aulos player, a Syro-Hittite mother and child, and a bronze statuette of a Spartan officer from the Wadsworth Atheneum museum.
Recreating the ancient figurines in various materials has allowed McCormack to add colour, missing in the originals. So he has used red brick to create the Spartan's scarlet cloak and helmet crest, the Venus of Willendorf's hair and the Dancing Girl's hair and arm bangles. White shell was used for eyes. He has added a spear and a shield to the Spartan.
McCormack also made statues of animals and birds, including a gorilla, an orang-utan, and a herring gull wearing a pschent, the double crown of Ancient Egypt (based on statuettes of Horus the sky god as a hawk wearing the crown).
McCormack's fishing boat, which can be seen in the grotto, is also a work of art, decorated with paintings copied from Greek vases, including a Gorgon, Geometric chariots and the sacrifice of the Trojan priestess Polyxena by Diomedes.[7]
In 2015, there were reports in the local news that Brighton Council wanted the statues demolished for health and safety reasons. A spokesman said, "We have real concerns over these structures because some are more than six foot high and have been built on council land without consent so we have to take action before somebody is seriously injured."[8]
Asked about his relationship with the council, McCormack said, "There was one occasion where one of the beach inspectors ...said, "I’m sorry, this has all got to come down", but that was two years after I started and by that time I'd spent two years in the middle of the beach on top of a ladder...sometimes 12, 15 foot off the ground, with the beach inspectors and whatever coming past me with no-one saying a dicky-bird. Then when I finished all the larger figures then they come along and say, "Ah, you shouldn’t have done that". So then I dug my heels in and carried on. That was more than three years ago and I haven't heard anything since."[1]
McCormack has said that the Flint Grotto is now finished: "I ran out of space and I was still on a roll...and to my mind I finished it by putting these tiny figures more mischievous and random...sort of frolicking over the tops of the other ones."[1] He has continued making statues on his allotment by the race hill, documented by the Keeper's Project, where he identified them as Tawaret (the Egyptian hippopotamus goddess), Bes (the Egyptian god of fertility, humour and war), a Minotaur, a seated Mexican god with a brazier (used as a bird table) on his head and a figure of Priapus, the Greek and Roman guardian of orchards and gardens.[9]
References
- ^ a b c d e f 'Rory’s McCormack’s Flint Grotto on Brighton beach', transcript of interview with David Clegg for the Keepers Project
- ^ Miller, Norman (17 March 2020). "How Brighton became an epicentre of freedom". BBC Online. BBC. Retrieved 16 September 2023.
- ^ a b David Bramwell and Tim Bick, The Cheeky Guide to Brighton, Cheeky Guides Ltd, 2016, p.33
- ^ Ellie Seymour, Secret Brighton: An Unusual Guide, Jonglez Publishing, 2018, p.37
- ^ a b Alexandra Loske, 111 Places in Brighton and Lewes that You Shouldn't Miss, Emons, 2018, p.74
- ^ David Bramwell, The Sing-Along-A-Wickerman Scrapbook, Nightfinch Books, 2023, p 89.
- ^ British Museum listing for the amphora showing the sacrifice of Polyxena
- ^ quoted by Jo Wadsworth, 'Brighton fisherman’s beach grotto under threat of demolition', Brighton and Hove News, 5 October 2015
- ^ Flint Sculptures, Brighton, East Sussex, The Keeper's Project