Frieze Sculptures in 2025 - Regent's Park

On Sunday 19th October, ten of us met at Great Portland Street station at 11.15am.  Actually, most of us managed to meet in Pret's, beforehand, to get a cup of tea.   I was surprised at how many EFOGees showed up; the drizzle started soon after we entered the park, but at least we didn't get the heavy rain that was forecast and it wasn't too cold.  

The Frieze Sculptures - an annual event that is London's largest free display of outdoor art - are dotted around The English Garden in Regent's Park; this year there were 14 works of art on display.   

We visited every piece that was there: 'plant-life' that, from most angles, looked like a man leaning his head against a pole; a group of intertwined lifebuoy rings that, if you squinted, looked like one of those balloon dogs that people make at kids' parties; a square cube of clay with pottery embedded in it, with the pottery decorated with flowers found in Regent's Park; a concrete filled-in tunnel representing the shadow of an ancient boulder, on the equinox (it didn't say which one); a huge body-less blue suit made for a giant; three bronze dancers that had rabbit ears / a ball in an armpit / a square head (that reminded one of our group of The Cooker in Wallace and Gromit's "A Grand Day Out" film) and dresses blowing up as if by the wind; some twisted salvaged wood; a miniature white bison on a rock in a metal canoe frame; three metal sculptures, atop cut-down telegraph poles, representing the waveforms of the birdcalls of a nightingale, a cuckoo and a crow; two huge ear trumpets, facing each other, above a series of metalwork bars that looked like a climbing frame for the local squirrels to enjoy; two giant metal digeridoos, with speakers attached at the thin ends playing the sounds of extinct birds - these are to be enjoyed simultaneously with the sound of birds in the park; three bent metal shapes, representing a snake, an eye and a seed, that 'explores ancient symbols of fertility', although that bypassed us as we were too busy trying to determine if the brown shape on the left was another snake or a seed pod - I still think it's a tamarind pod; a huge straw dog under which we sheltered from the rain for a few minutes - it supposedly has glow-in-the-dark straps, but of course it wasn't dark at 12.40pm; and finally a stainless steel piece that 'reimagines a rhododendron bonsai tree as a futuristic hybrid of nature and digital design'. The helicoptering flower heads were very impressive.  

We spent about an hour and a half looking at all the sculptures, critiquing and admiring the different pieces. Unlike previous years, the descriptions were actually intelligble, with no long, multi-syllable words, which did help considerably as we didn't have to keep Googling the meanings.  

Most of us then walked to the Wetherspoons pub by Baker Street station, via the Rose Garden and the boating lake, where we managed to get tables next to each other.  After a pleasant, leisurely lunch, we headed for the tube station and home.   

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