SCULPTURE: Sculptress Joan Morrell thinks Protection in Adversity looks fine in her Wanganui garden though it really should be standing somewhere else.
It's a bronze sculpture in the form of a fountain ? children, a cat and a dog beneath a brolly.
The sculpture rather than the name ought to ring a
bell. Protection in Adversity was an uncontroversial but popular feature of Moutoa Gardens in a time when the historic reserve had not become a focus for Maori agitation.
Families loved to be photographed at the sculpture.
It was a Joan Morrell gift to Wanganui.
The concept came to mind one night when she was thinking the old water fountain at Moutoa Gardens had seen better days, having been reduced to a trickle.
She envisaged children standing under an umbrella. Her children were obvious models.
"And I put the cat and dog in because they were part of the family."
Her original sculpture was made of concrete, though it looked metallic. The finished work was handed over at a gathering involving Mayor Reg Andrews.
Protection in Adversity Mk I was benign.
"There was nothing political about it," Mrs Morrell recalled.
The fountain was pretty much intact until the largely unheralded Moutoa Gardens occupation of 1995. An infant drowned and the fountain was promptly destroyed. Mrs Morrell still refuses to dwell on what happened.
"I felt it was not maliciously done," she said. "It was nothing personal. It just copped it along the way."
Eventually the Wanganui District Council asked her for a quote, so along came Protection in Adversity Mk II, courtesy of an insurance payout.
It's the effectively the same design as the original. In dappled light deep in Mrs Morrell's rambling garden it's striking.
But it needs a home to go to ? and not necessarily Moutoa Gardens, in her opinion.
"I don't mind where it lives."
