Marylin Monroe
Sectors:
Using: Ground Mats (GPRM)
Client: Anonymous – Secret location – South East England
It’s not every day that you get asked to move a 20th Century icon (in fact we do have some form of this as a longstanding client, The Green Oak Carpentry Company, worked with Paul de Moncheuax to build a timber sculpture for the occasion of the BBC’s Great Britain’s competition awarded to Winston Churchill which then we shipped into the Houses of Parliament…but that’s a different story…)
This time it was a highly polished, very heavy, but nonetheless fragile 2,t tonne black marble sculpture representing Marylin Monroe. It had to be moved from the studios in the Thames Valley where the artist and his team had spent hundreds if not thousands of hours cleaving and sculpting the iron hard stone and then polishing it to a lustre.
The job had more than its fair share of complications, including; –
- It was a load certainly not designed to be transported, and made of a natural material that could, in all probability, have a fatal flaw in its fabric should it not be moved with the utmost of care.
- The delivery point, chosen for its aesthetic position, security and proximity to London Gatwick for visiting foreign buyers and certainly not for its easy access for heavy lifting gear had manicured drives and gardens and plenty of mature and rare trees.
- A metre difference from the drive to the lawn level, where the sculpture need to be to maximise the natural lighting, precluded the obvious choice of a telehandler to lift and carry it to the chosen spot.
- The clients ‘artistic-temperament’ coupled with the uniqueness of the work and the nigh on a million pound asking price made every decision made, sensitive in the extreme.
So the sculpture was wrapped, then a lifting rig was carefully attached and it was wrapped again for transport by a Super truck. Our Moffett forklift was then craned onto the lawn and positioned on a quantity of 3.0 x 1.0 metre GPRM ‘Ground Protection Mats’. Once the roadway had been laid out across the lawn, ‘Marylin’ was raised up, stabilised, reconnected to the Moffett and placed on the pre sited plinth with surgical precision.
We then took all of equipment away, leaving her standing there alone, as if angels had bought her back for a while, and not ruined the lawn in the process.