If you know where to look you can see the figure from afar. It’s not like Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, huge and high on a hill; Gormley made ‘GRIP’ to more modest dimensions.
The human outline becomes more obvious as we draw nearer, but it is only after we’ve scrambled through the scrubland trees at the back of the beach, struggled over sharp pinnacles of layered rock eroded by the tides and the shifting shingle beach, waded across the stranded river and scaled the rocks on which ‘GRIP’ stands that we can see the clearly androgynous form.
The sculpture stands, feet together fixed firmly to the rocks, hands clasped behind, seeming to stare calmly out to sea. Over one shoulder is the sweep of Saddell Bay and Arran, over the other is Ailsa Craig, a distinctively symmetrical cone of rock inhabited only by seabirds. In meditative mood we notice, further out to sea, a mirage of small islands hovering above the horizon and wonder at the phenomenon.
I admire the figure’s fearless stance, defying the ankle turning rocks slippery with seaweed and daring the sea to do its worst as the tide rises to cover and corrode the metal structure. One day the sea will win, of course, but for now, unworried by its future fate, the human form stands secure and calm while tides ebb and flow and storms come and go. I wish I could overcome fears for the future, worry less about ‘losing my grip’, about a painful slip, a broken ankle, hip or head and concern myself less about the inevitable advance of time, rising tide, climate change and the fragility of life.
Instead, perhaps sooner than I need, I slither and stumble my way back over the wet weed and shingle, to wade across the river, now set in reverse flow by the tide and get ahead of the rapidly advancing sea.
As I reach the relative safety of the rock pools and leafy scrub, I steal a glance back to see the beach disappearing and ‘GRIP’, still seemingly untroubled, surrounded by sea.
Surely both feet must soon be submerged but ‘GRIP’ is made of cast iron stuff and can feel no fear, unlike us humans for whom fear is the first and final frontier of life.