Princess XL ( fountain #1 and #2) by Scott Eady for SCAPE Public Art Season 2019

Princess XL (fountain #1 and #2) began with an action performed by Scott Eady’s son, playfully brandishing a vegetable grown in the family garden. The artist’s cast bronze marrows, balanced atop stools, humorously evoked the history of fertility statues, from ancient civilisations through to early Modernism. The juggle of family life and life as an artist hangs over much of Eady’s work, along with our changing attitudes to masculinity.

Like much of Eady’s work in recent years, Princess XL (fountain #1 and #2) were functional as well as visual, providing drinking water for thirsty visitors. One hundred years after Marcel Duchamp pushed the parameters of what art could be by removing the plumbing from a urinal and naming it Fountain, Eady suggests that art and life can flow together.