It started with a Clydesdale. Andy Scott submitted a design in 1997 for a sculpture along a main highway between Edinburgh and Glasgow in his homeland of Scotland. The famous draft horses were originally bred in that region of central Scotland, and Scott’s Clydesdale concept was chosen as the public art installation. A few years later, when Scott had limited time to create a piece for an Australia exhibition, he created another Clydesdale. People began to notice, and one job led to another. The more he sculpted, the more Andy Scott became entranced with horses as recurring subject matter.
“They’ve become one of my favorite themes to work on,” Scott tells us with a Scottish lilt, while recently on the road from his home in Los Angeles to Colorado Springs. “I really enjoy the challenge of them as an animal and humans’ historic association with them. It’s just the gift that keeps giving in terms of artistic inspiration. I sometimes joke that it would be nice to do something else, but every time one comes along I absolutely love it.”
Now, the acclaimed artist’s latest horse sculpture will reside in Colorado Springs, standing at the entrance to Percheron, a new planned community being built by the Norwood Development Group. You might recognize the name as that of the muscular draft horse that originated in western France. Scott was a natural fit to create a signature, placemaking art installation depicting a large Percheron horse that ties the new neighborhood to its past. His work, Belle, will be unveiled in a public dedication on Sept. 4
Public Art as a Placemaker
“This neighborhood marks the first development within Norwood’s portion of the former Banning Lewis Ranches,” says Tracy Doherty, Norwood’s vice president of marketing and communications. “In creating it, we sought a way to honor Ruth Banning — an extraordinary figure in our city’s history. We chose the name Percheron in tribute to the powerful draft horses she once raised, which hauled ice and coal throughout Colorado Springs during her earliest business ventures, before she turned to ranching.”
Scott and his wife visited the Springs last January after Norwood reached out about commissioning a new piece of public art at Percheron. While staying at the Mining Exchange Hotel, Scott drew a sketch of his concept and presented it to the the team at Norwood. They loved it, and the artist was able to go from paper directly to full-scale production.
Norwood has a long history of supporting public art that includes helping to establish the annual downtown Art on the Streets series. “We wanted to carry that tradition forward in the eastern portion of Colorado Springs,” Doherty says. “In exploring equestrian sculpture, we were immediately struck by Andy’s extraordinary work. His sculptures not only capture the spirit of a place, but also help transform it into something enduring — both a destination and a source of community pride.”
Nowhere is that more evident than Falkirk, Scotland, home of The Kelpies, Scott’s most famous and arguably most popular work. The magnificent pair of 100-foot high, 300-ton horse heads are the largest equine sculpture in the world, and they have become both a symbol for and leading destination in Scotland, drawing more than 7 million visitors since their installation in 2014.
In Scottish mythology, kelpies were shape-shifting water beasts in the Scottish Highlands that often took the form of horses to lure the unsuspecting to their doom. Scott’s sculpture blended that legend with the working Clydesdales that traditionally pulled barges and wagons that once helped to shape the nation’s industry and economy.
Belle the Percheron
Though nowhere near as large as The Kelpies, Scott’s Percheron will be larger than life, standing 15 feet hoof to head and weighing 2.5 tons. That’s large enough to fill Scott’s L.A. studio with a powerful presence as he fully assembled the sculpture there before disassembling it into several pieces for transport to Colorado Springs.
“She’s big enough, but it’s the right size for the location,” Scott says. “Sometimes people can overdo things and create these colossal sculptures, which actually have the effect of overpowering a location rather than working in symphony with a location. I think for this particular project, it’s absolutely the right scale.”
Scott has given Belle a forward leaning, dynamic pose “as if she’s striding home from work to the pasture after a busy day perhaps.” With a front hoof raised, the sculpture conveys a sense of movement. To make it work, the artist had to solve the structural challenges of supporting the forward shift of multiple tons of steel. That’s a normal part of Scott’s work, and this project was relatively straightforward compared with supporting The Kelpies or the 100-foot wing span of The Calling that he installed last year in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Even working at large scale, Scott pays attention to small details to ground his sculptures in their natural surroundings. “I asked which direction the prevailing wind was, so I’ve actually made this unusually with the mane and the tail blowing forward on the sculpture rather than just hanging down or to the side,” he says. “It’s very distinctive and has come out very well. I’m pleased with how that evolved. It just makes it look like it belongs on that location. It makes it feel a bit more at home with a sense of place, a sense of belonging.”
Shaped by Place and Process
Like much of Scott’s work, Belle is fashioned with a “skin” of welded and galvanized mild steel. It’s not an easy material to work with, but the medium seems deeply tied to the industrial, working class Glasgow of his youth. He likens it to an American city with an industrial heritage like Pittsburgh or Detroit, once powerful hubs left to reinvent themselves after fading in the wake of changing economies. It’s something Scott says he’s been thinking about lately with clearer hindsight at 61 years old.
“I think growing up there in the ’60s, it was almost part of my DNA in a sense,” he says.”Every family either had or knew people who worked in the industries. And I think inevitably that kind of trickled through into my young sensibility in a weird way. It kind of made sense that steel would somehow be part of what I did as an artist.”
Scott knew early on that he wanted to be an artist, and with supportive parents he attended Glasgow School of Art. The ability to interact with sculpture in three dimensions captivated him and became his focus even as a student. Early on, when he was making clay sculptures to be cast in bronze, he was welding steel armature for internal support, but it was just a pragmatic part of the process.
“It evolved in a sense to become the final artwork. It’s kind of just part of me; it’s the way that I like to work,” Scott says. “Steel is not a very forgiving material, and I like to try and make it look alive. The idea of breathing life into such an unforgiving material has a lot of challenges, but it gives me a great sense of satisfaction and clients seem to respond very well when they see 3 tons or 10 tons of steel become apparently a living equine or whatever it might be. It is very challenging. It’s very difficult to do, but I really enjoy that task.”
Scott likes to visit his sculptures whenever he gets the chance. And at their initial installation, he enjoys meeting the people who will live and interact with them regularly to give them a better understanding of, in this case, “this big Percheron horse, which is about to arrive in their midst.” After Belle’s dedication in Colorado Springs, Scott will give a free artist talk on Aug. 5 at the downtown Meanwhile Block.
“I like to let the audience and the clients and the eventual cohabitants with these sculptures know how they came about,” Scott says. “An awful lot of big sculpture these days is made by computers and 3D printers and such, but I’m old-school. I’m making these by hand — me and my colleague. It’s important to me in an era of increased mechanization that there are still artists out there with genuine hand skills and imagination. That’s certainly what I am proud to be.”
Meet Sculptor Andy Scott and Belle the Percheron
Belle is Andy Scott’s first local work, but not his first sculpture in Colorado. You may recognize his sculpture of Ullr the Norse snow god shooting an arrow into the mountains as the Peak 8 base of Breckenridge Ski Resort. Here are two opportunities to meet the renowned artist and see his latest sculpture in Colorado Springs.
Sculpture Dedication Ceremony
Thursday, Sept. 4 at 5 p.m.
Location: Percheron at the intersection of Banning Lewis Parkway and Woodmen Road
Open to the public. No RSVP required.
Andy Scott Artist Talk
Friday, Sept. 5 at 7-8:30 p.m.
Location: The Barrel Building at the Meanwhile Block
An RSVP is required as seating is limited. Reserve your spot here.
