Ray Lonsdale unveils new sculpture Then Gone (George) in Seaham

Transcript

00:00Ray, we're down here at Then Gone, which is your latest sculpture. Can you talk us through how this

00:05one came about? Yeah, it was approached by Graham Kennedy, who runs all the Bell's fish shops and

00:12owns them. And he was wanting something to do with the mine and heritage, because this particular

00:16shopping scene was all based around mine and heritage. You go in there, there's all sorts

00:20of memorabilia and what have you in. So he was wanting at first a life-size miner, full-scale,

00:26to stand either inside or outside of the shop. And we've had a conversation and between us,

00:32we came up with this idea of this seven times life head as something different. It's a different

00:37sort of scale for us, because this was done in conjunction with my son, Sam, from Creative

00:42Air Publications. So we worked together on this with it being such a large scale piece.

00:47And it was unveiled last night. What was the response like?

00:50The unveiling was brilliant. It was really well done. We had Matt Baker over here, so he knew

00:56what he was doing, which makes a difference for me. So it was nice to sort of have so many people

01:01here. The band, the pit bands and the banners were there. So it was a really lovely sort of community

01:08spirit. And this piece joins the ones that were unveiled in Sunderland recently, which have also

01:13been getting a great response, haven't they? Yeah, they seem to be. You know, it's a nice spot for

01:19them. It's a nice area then. It's becoming a proper sculpture trail in itself. There's a proposal

01:24to put another one between those two pieces, actually, which is a fellow's hoping to donate

01:29that one to the council, but that's still in the pipeline. And obviously you do pieces around the

01:34country, but you're from the North East. You must feel a special connection to these particular pieces.

01:40Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of the work we do is sort of North East heritage based.

01:46And that's just the way it's sort of come about, you know, but it's a lovely thing to be involved with.

01:49And so we just sort of have that connection with the industrial past, because that's where I came

01:54from. And then all that, virtually all that industrial past is being eked away and given up.

02:01And it's nice for me to sort of remember those people and to reconnect with them and rub shoulders

02:08with them again.