Courtesy of Mark Chatterley
"Blue Human Condition" is shown in the space between the City Chambers Building and the Adrian Police Department before it was covered with a blue tarp. The piece sparked complaints from people who saw it as sexually suggestive.
The sculptor who created “Blue Human Condition,” the piece on the Adrian Art Discovery installation downtown that was covered up Wednesday morning, says he was surprised and disappointed to learn that there were people who found it offensive.
Courtesy of Mark Chatterley
Mark Chatterley of Williamston works on a sculpture.
“I thought it was a pretty normal piece that didn’t have any kind of sexual connotations,” Mark Chatterley of Williamston said in a telephone interview with Adrian Today.
The sculptor shows seven androgynous figures resting on each other in various poses. Chatterley said the vision behind the piece was to portray the way people depend on each other.
“My initial thought was that we all need each other for support,” Chatterley said. “We can’t do it alone and we are a global village, so we are all resting on someone else to survive. That’s what this piece is about.”
The sculpture, which is made of clay, started with the curled-up figure on the bottom — the “bedrock,” Chatterley said. Then it grew out from that center as he sculpted more figures to add to the piece. The creation process took about three months from start to finish.
City officials started to receive complaints about the sculpture after it was installed Monday. The people lodging the complaints felt it was sexually suggestive, and the word “orgy” was used to describe it. It was covered with a blue tarp on Wednesday and scheduled to be replaced with another piece.
“I’m disappointed that people would read that kind of stuff into it,” Chatterley said.
“I really had to work at it to think about how it would offend people,” he added. “I just didn’t get it.”
Chatterley has been participating in the Midwest Sculpture Initiative, through which the outdoor exhibit was created, for eight years. He’s been a sculptor for about 30 years.
Adrian Art Discovery, which includes sculptures at several locations throughout downtown Adrian, is funded by a grant from the Maurice and Dorothy Stubnitz Foundation and by the Harriet Kimball Fee Estate.
Click here to read our earlier story about the sculpture’s covering.