Ystad skulpturpark

The housing cooperative around Kemners torg – a square in the Gjuteri area – considered for many years if they should campaign for a sculpture at the site. The idea was to have a work of art that would be linked to the history of the setting. This was the site of one of the town’s important early industries, a foundry and engineering works, namely Ystads Gjuteri & Mekaniska Verkstad. The buildings were demolished in the 1980s to provide space for a new residential area.

On the advice of the then Director of Ystad Museum, Håkan Nilsson, the housing cooperative asked artist and designer Göran Hazelius if he would be interested in the commission. The collections of the Ystad Archeological Association contain a large number of artefacts from the foundry. Göran Hazelius was struck by one of the small preserved models of the foundry’s best-selling product, the stone-crushing machine, Samson. To connect the past with the present day, Göran Hazelius had the idea of depicting a boy balancing his skateboard over the flywheel of a symbolic buried stone-crushing machine – the boy with skateboard in bronze, the stone-crusher in concrete. It was also self-evident for the artist that children should be able to climb on the sculpture without getting hurt or damaging it. Samson was unveiled in 1996.

Göran Hazelius is a versatile artist in the cultural field and has worked as a designer for many museums around Sweden. In the 1980s, he was often engaged to produce portrait-like wax models for exhibitions. Among his works