Diana and the Fawn has been restored to pristine white as
part of this year's art school exhibition. .
 

WIMBLEDON School of Art student Toby Christian used this year’s sculpture exhibition in Cannizaro Park to clean the statue of Diana the Huntress after decades of weathering. Funded jointly by the school, Merton and the Friends, Toby hired a conservation firm to clean half of the statue (see above) for the exhibition weekend and completed the job three weeks later.

Diana now appears as she did long before Cannizaro became a public park in 1949. She is the only lasting result of the "Skulpcha" exhibition with its emphasis on transience. Curator Sally Shaw explained: "The premise was to take a wry look at what a contemporary, contextual sculptural practice might look like. Any sculpture is a contextually located object that in some way draws lines of inference between it and its surroundings. The works in this show do so with a certain chutzpah.

"The most striking feature is the predominance of works that result in no permanent objects at all. This sculpture exists in a manipulation of time and place rather than physical materials."

Other works included Steve Wright’s gingerbread models of George W Bush suspended from a tree by Connoisseurs’ Corner; Ambrosine Allen’s "Proposals for the End of the World", a continual experiment by the Belvedere in building wood and found objects; and Karolina Honkajuuri’s "Tea Party with My Monkey", performed with a crochet primate near the pond.

All were truly transient and gone after the first weekend in May. Diana and the Fawn, on the other hand, has already graced Cannizaro Park since the 1920s and looks like continuing for a long time to come.