![](\"http:\/\/photos3.flickr.com\/5773346_9dae81515b_m.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThis is a dawn picture of one of my favourite sculptures in Canberra, on Ellery Crescent outside the School of Art. Its by a Finnish artist, Olavi Lanu, and was made in 1982.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You can see it enlarged and from a few different angles here<\/a>.<\/p>\n At first I really did think it was group of real granite boulders that just happened to look like a person sleeping. I like imagining that rocks or mountains are slumbering spirits that sometimes might stretch and come alive to go about their business when no-one is about. Of course there are lots of stories along those lines; the ancient stone creature in Patricia Wrightson’s children’s book The Nargun and the Stars<\/a> comes to mind.<\/p>\n But Lanu’s reclining figure is made from fibreglass resin, presumably on a wire form. Apparently<\/a> it was originally covered with moss, but over the years lichens have taken over. There is another figure<\/a> by Lanu not far away, but sitting among some trees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a dawn picture of one of my favourite sculptures in Canberra, on Ellery Crescent outside the School of Art. Its by a Finnish artist, Olavi Lanu, and was made in 1982. You can see it enlarged and from a few different angles here. At first I really did think it was group of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,48,10,9],"tags":[1378,201,1361],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-canberra","category-sculpture","category-visual-art","tag-canberra","tag-olavi-lanu","tag-sculpture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paZhI-1h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3224,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/3224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}