As soon as the new sculptural group at the Clay Center was unveiled last summer I hopped into my car and went downtown to take a look. Having been dumbfounded often enough at what passes for sculpture in the city (please check out the sculpture deck at the Department of Culture and History building), I wasn’t very sanguine. It seems really good sculpture is almost impossible to obtain — witness the 11-year-struggle to complete the Veteran’s Memorial on the Capitol campus. Meanwhile, the crappy stuff is fairly easy.

Finding a site, though, is another matter. But site difficulties can be overturned if a person has an obvious “in.” For example, a worthy cause. Or deep pockets. Take firefighters: who can argue that firefighters are heroic? Surely they deserve better than the horrific memorial they got at the W.Va. Department of Culture and History, which is laughably incompetent. Of all its inadequacies, the first is that it is life scale, not heroic scale.

So there I went to the Clay Center. The hoopla of the dedication the day before was all over. There, poking our eyes out on the corner was a weird grouping of children in Renaissance Era dress, dancing around a purported tree to the distant music of childhood. So far, so good. Ya t’ink?

I admit to being perplexed. All I could wonder is: What in the hell is a memorial to the Black Death doing on a corner of Charleston, West Virginia? Doesn’t it belong at some debarkation point memorializing the tragic episode of the Children’s Crusade in Medieval Europe? Because that’s no tree, that’s a ghastly rose, rising stiff, thorny, and unyielding as any of the scentless wonders sold by florists these days. Pre-dedication publicity made much of the “tree” and that excited my interest. I believe I’ve only seen one sculptural tree done well, and it’s on the campus of Vanderbilt University.

You remember the rhyme, dating deep into the plague era of the Medieval period: “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy / Ashes, Ashes, we all fall dead.” As a nursery rhyme, it occasioned much hilarity as little kids fell over in giggly heaps, or at least it did when I was a child. I hear today that in many playgrounds it’s a forbidden game, as some kind of black magical mantra. Now, we have it memorialized at the Clay Center. That’s a hoot. (NOT-SO-FUN FACTS: The “ring around the rosy” was the livid color of the skin surrounding the buboes (swollen lymph glands), while the “pocket full of posy” were herbs carried in vain attempts to avoid the contagion of the bubonic plague, most active in Europe in the 14th century. It coincided with the Crusades and the Renaissance.)

In a way, the dark subtext of the sculpture echoes the dark horror of childhood: being always at the mercy of others, of bigger, often unseen monsters of reality and imagination. Maurice Sendak knows this all too well.

As the natural trees grow up around the site of this sculpture (if they are allowed), they will create a glade about the group, which can only make the site and sculpture more intriguing. Right now, it’s terrible.

— By Jane Claymore

EDITOR’S NOTE: The ArtAttack groupblog received a late response to Jane Claymore’s lambasting of the Clay Center’s “ring around the rosy” sculpture(”One Ghastly Sculpture?“). In the interests of it not getting lost in the shuffle, we are posting it here since it is one parent’s eye (and one kid’s eye) view of the sculpture. Other responses welcome.

SHARON REED HILL Writes:

In response to Jane Claymore’s caustic comments about the sculpture at the Clay Center, I beg to differ! As a former elementary teacher of 35 years, I know about the derivation of “Ring Around The Rosey,” about Maurice Sendak (whose books children love but there are adults who want to read sordid things into them) and art.

But mostly I know about kids. To call the sculpture at the Clay Center morbid, etc., from her point of view is absurd as well as frightening: What if people reading her blog started thinking that way and then imposed their thoughts on others? One can take anything that he or she sees and bend it to his or her point of view. But the sculpture at the Clay Center is a thing of beauty.

Last weekend, I took my 8-year-old granddaughter to the Clay Center’s “Hooray For Hollywood” workshop for kids. We had a great time but she wanted to go upstairs to see the film industry’s clothing exhibit as did I. And we took in all of the artworks, too. Then it was back down to the science exhibits where we tested everything until we were worn out. Upon leaving, she immediately ran outside to the sculpture. Like me, she had seen if from a distance but never up close and personal.

She went from figure to figure smiling as she went around; I had to take at least 10 pictures of her using my camera. We decided upon which figure we loved the best (the dancing girl) and then we both commented on how much we loved the tree! She said she would like to have it in her house. So would I! And neither of us wanted to leave the sculpture area: it has a magic about it. And that magic is the happiness of children.

All of us have the little child inside of us no matter how old we get. Perhaps Ms. Claymore has forgotten that aspect. Some things are just as they are. Nothing more. The sculpture represents joy and happiness of childhood. Kudos to the Peytons and the Clay Center for enabling all of us to have such an artwork to gaze upon. It truly is magic in its truest sense.