Vehicular Vernacular 

H 245cm x w 100cm x d 150cm 

Scrap metal, gloss paint, paper mache, gorilla tape and found objects

Julie Oxenforth

2024

 

Local artist Julie Oxenforth has created a new public artwork inspired by Scunthorpe Town Centre and the Bus Station. This busy thoroughfare of downtown and location of fountain arts, is where she made this public art inspired by the town centre. 

 

Absorbing visual data from this vicinity - the railings, brightly coloured buses, streetlamps and buildings - this is Oxenforth’s ‘trolleybus’ – an abstract thing created with found objects, paint, fixings and fastenings, which alludes to travel, movement and flight. It has taken a hit, a kick in the ribs, but stands defiant and looks towards the light like a flower. 

 

The projecting poles from the ‘chassis’ serve to accentuate the direction of line. Each element of the ensemble can have multiple associations. The cross motif, taken from the library wall could be a connector, conductor or propeller. One buoy becomes an anchor, the other becomes a beacon. 

 

Julie said “I have been thinking of lightness and heaviness. Departures and arrivals. The seamless flow running through the tension of opposites. Thinking about a hometown. Escaping it. Embracing it.”