Quite recently I spent some months working on a very large piece of sculpture, a standing figure. (a woman, obviously). My first thought was that I would make it from strips of steel, welded together. It was a little over three metres high, almost twice life sized, so it soon became quite heavy as I welded one strip to another. With the help of a family of couch surfers who were staying at the time, we wrestled it up on to the concrete plinth I had made for it beside the track about fifty metres from the house, so that I could finish it in situ.
I liked it less and less as I continued to work on it. At some point I decided to use the steel figure as an armature and to cover the whole thing in ciment fondu. A mistake, or at least a waste of time. The thing refused to cooperate. In the end I could hardly bear to look at it, even though it was obscured by scaffolding.
After a month or two of averting my eyes as I drove past this faulty monument, I unwound a fifty metre electrical cable from the house, connected an angle grinder, and cut the wretched thing off at the ankles. It went over with a very satisfactory crunch.
What I hadn’t realised was that people had got used to its presence- it had been around for maybe six months- and were perplexed that I had destroyed it. I cut the prostrate figure up with my angle grinder into manageable pieces: it was blocking the track: and ferried them in the truck to a local tip.