Throne For The Common Person - Stone, UK
Posted by: 
dtrebilc
N 52° 54.011 W 002° 08.748
30U E 557457 N 5861507
This bench is in Westbridge park and stands very close to the Trent and Mersey canal.
Waymark Code: WM10BGJ
Location: West Midlands, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 04/07/2019
Views: 5
The seat and mosaics were made by Philip Hardaker with children from local schools.
The seat is built on a low brick plinth. The structure has a breeze block support and makes use of recycled Victorian blue bricks as well as slate. The structure is faced in ceramic mosaics, pieces from local ceramic companies' products, glass beads, and tiles.
It is named 'Throne For The Common Person'.
Philip Hardaker - Sculptor, Ceramicist and Moasic Artist
Arts Consultant for Community, Education and Public Arts
Philip Hardaker was born in Harrogate, North Yorshire in 1954. He attended Harrogate College of Art in 1975 then went on to North Staffordshire Polytechnic to gain a first class honours degree in Fine Art Sculpture. He moved to London in 1977 when he attended the Royal College of Art and gained an M. A in Fine Art Ceramics in 1980. His lecturers included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake and Lord Queensbury.
Philip moved to Somerset in 1980, renting a studio in Bruton from Dutch painter Henk Huffener.
Since 1985 he has lived in a seventeenth century packhorse inn on the outskirts of Stoke on Trent, working as a sculptor mainly in the public sector and undertaking many educational projects and private commissions.
Hardaker is an accumulator, a shifter of detritus collecting the flotsam and jetsom of our wasteful consumer society and transforming these materials into art. He represents his work as archeological sculptural paintings made from clay and found objects. For thirty years he has been digging up ancient and modern ceramic shards from Staffordshire and around the world. He employs these fragments of past ages along with his own modelled and cast ceramic elements of heads, animals and aeroplanes in ceramic collages of considerable intricacy and beauty. Hardaker's work has political and ecological objectives and concerns in communicating comment on historical events. The work is also intrinsically linked with being English and celebrating the past production of Staffordshire ceramics and creativity.
The philosophy, ideas and messages behind the work capture the age we live in with both serious intent and irony and a strong sense of humour.
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The throne was made in 2008 and since then a Marks and Spencer store has been erected in the park behind the throne but it is still accessible.