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Packing up… the Heath’s table-and-chair sculpture

Art installation returns to land of its birth after summer success


Artist Giancarlo Neri as The Writer is removed from Parliament Hill
IN the end it will return to the country of its birth – perhaps the biggest flat-pack table and chair ever made and certainly the largest to grace Hampstead Heath.
The Writer, a mammoth art installation by Italian artist Giancarlo Neri, was being slowly dismantled from its prime position on the slopes of Parliament Hill on Tuesday.
Since its installation in June, it has become a magnet for Heath visitors, with some contributing their own maverick artwork – a giant book and pencil, an outsize cappuccino cup – and one amorous couple even using the table as an impromptu bed.
Now the 30ft sculpture is being shipped to Monza in Lombardy, where it will be sited at the Villa Reale, the biggest enclosed park in Europe.
Its creator, a former football player-turned artist, said: “There is a saying in showbusiness that you shouldn’t outstay your welcome. It is going at the right time. Those people who loved it will miss it and the people who hated it will be pleased.”
He added: “It has been very rewarding for me. So many people who have seen it have told me how much they loved it. It will stay in the memory, hopefully.”
But Mary Port, a member of the Corporation of London’s Heath consultative committee who opposed the installation, said she had not changed her mind. She added: “It is not what the Heath was set up for. We have a duty to preserve the Heath as a piece of country, not to start bringing in artefacts.”
Tony Hillier, chairman of the Heath and Hampstead Society, said the society had supported the project. He added: “I think it is a fine sculpture and I suspect most people who saw it felt like that.”



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