The Broken Art of Palmyra’s Wickham statues will break your heart. Many in the Land Between the Lakes area have long heard stories and tales of the fabled concrete statues of Enoch Tanner Wickham (E.T.), 1882–1970. Some think they are myth and do not actually exist. They exist.
In the simple glory of imagination. There stand, in pieces and jagged edges, the sad and magnificent remnants of the Wickham statues. Seeing them is surreal. They do not look real. They look like something out of one of your dreams that takes a strange, magical turn but for some reason while you are dreaming, make perfect sense.
Vandals have fractured and ruptured the original concrete statues. But the vandals have not destroyed the vision of the artist. As a human with emotions and empathy, just looking at the Broken art of the Wickham statues helps you understand your own fractured, yet still mostly intact exsistence.
The Broken art of the Wickham statues are a perfect, or perhaps imperfect, metaphor for life as we have it today after the paradigm shift of culture due in no small part to the pandemic, the aftermath and events of these strange days.
I took lots of photos of the remaining Wickham statues and I will be posting them in the summer days to come. My narrative is not so much the history of the simple, elegant, vandalized statues; but will feature my impressions of each piece or the fractured works in combination.
If you have never seen the statues, they are worth a visit. Seeing them and taking my photographs, my broken art of the artist’s broken art, was one of my categories on my own bucket list I can now remove. I look forward to not only sharing these rich, intriguing images, I anticipate reading my own impressions and musings of the remnants of these broken, simple masterpieces that hide in plain sight in the woods along two back roadsides in rural Palmyra in Montgomery County, Tennessee.
Drive to historic Palmyra., Tennessee and look for Buck Smith Hill Road and Oak Ridge Road. It won’t take long for the statues to find you.
The Broken art of the Wickham statues will break your heart and also lift your spirits. Who doesn’t need that, especially now? Even broken, damaged and flawed, the art is still doing what it was intended by the artist to do — inspire those who care to experience and appreciate the vision of one who dared to create.
Story and Photos by David R. Ross —– LBLUS.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Tanner_Wickham
