Last month a statue was erected on campus outside the Hatton Gallery inside the quadrangle. The statue being the startling figure by Senior Fine Art Lecturer Katie Cuddon depicting a headless and yellow skinned figure with arms outstretched, wearing a pink tutu and tree trunk legs.
It has been the subject of intense curiosity on campus, and to some the source of dismay, Danny Jones Medicinal Chemistry student at Newcastle University has started an online petition calling for the executive board at the university to remove the statue. He commented:
‘” I have no idea what the statue itself is trying to portray or how anyone else would be able to link it to something relatable – it is a headless multicoloured ‘human’ with wavy tree trunk legs. If it does have a message to send across then it isn’t doing it very well.”
“I, as well as others, admire the area it is in too much for it to be abused by something that doesn’t even have an official title people can refer to. Newcastle University has an amazing campus that was once walked by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and comedian Rowan Atkinson and we pride ourselves on being original and having a campus the same as it was in its former years when it was once a part of Durham University.”
“The modernisation pool is spreading into the university and the statue is the first sign of this to leak into the Architecture Quadrangle and the active petition is the sandbag needed to stop it.”’
As present the petition stands at 380 signatures, and it has been mainly advertised on Facebook groups like Castle Leazes Ticket Exchange. But Danny denies any kind of joke in his attempts to get the statue removed and insists that it is intended as ‘”a genuine plea to the executive board to get it removed.”’
During the summer a similar petition was circulated surrounding installation of The Clasp statue by Sir Anthony Gormely, who also created The Angel of the North (1998). Outcry over this statue has since died down among students, and is regarded as a piece that is here to stay, and perhaps generation defining. This differs though from Cuddon’s piece in that hers is more temporary, it silently arrived into the quadrangle despite its loud presence within it.
If you would like to sign Danny’s petition it can be found here: