Art Throb #15: Northumberlandia, the Lady of the North (2012) by Charles Jencks

Driving north from Plymouth there's a hill that my husband always says looks like the breast of a woman lying on her back. It always makes me think of the old idea that the hills and rolls of the landscape are actually the bodies of sleeping giants that will one day rise again. For me, Northumberlandia encapsulates that idea, and more.

I first saw Northumberlandia on the BBC Breakfast programme in 2012 and she instantly prompted a number of evocations – Peruvian Nazca lines, the Cerne Abbas man, the Green Man, fertility goddesses, erotic follies such as those at West Wycombe Park and the garden goddess sculptures at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, to name but a few... I wanted to find out more. Typing 'Northumberlandia' into Google, I saw 'Northumberlandia Slag Alice' come up: trust the Daily Mail to be so rude. She's been created in a disused coal pit, hence the slag connection, but even so, it wouldn't even have occurred to me. Not that I'm surprised: that rag is hardly renowned for its positive attitude towards women of any shape or form. Northumerlandia may be reminiscent of ancient goddesses but when it comes to women the DM is prehistoric.

The DM does however provide quite a comprehensive piece on how this project came about, despite the fact that it also calls her "fat slag", and despite its pervy tone: "Drivers on the A1 will get a good view of her head, and rail passengers on the London-to-Endinburgh line will get a good eyeful of her rear." Ooh-er, Matron. I suppose that, like the Cern Abbas giant, she is impressively endowed (although as she is lying half on her side, she's not as explicit as the big man and as such I'm not so sure she's intended to be a fertility symbol). People will be able to walk upon her mounds and hills – the ultimate interraction between an artwork and its audience. But she is also something more graceful and powerful.

Drawing on the land, concreting it over, carving and scraping it out, forcing it to conform to our will – none of this is new and Northumberlandia herself is built on an an area bearing the scars of human rape and pillage. But now the fossil fuel has been exhausted, something beautiful has risen from the ashes. Having become disillusioned with the figure of the reclining Venus in art, I find that this odalisque takes the tired old trope (not "trollop", as the DM would have it) back where it needs to be: the land, whose undulations are ideally suited to rendering the curves of the female body. She is a real Venus – organic, tactile, approachable, three dimensional – landscaping the earth, but also reaching out into the big sky and its constellations. As such, there is something truly cosmic about her. What's more, as a part of the land she will age and evlove, rather than remain preserved in aspic, and give birth to growing forms.

As an example of landscaping alone, she is astonishing: her stats (or her "vital statistics" as the DM would probably say) are impressive: made of 1.5 million tonnes of earth, and at a quarter of a mile long she's thought to be largest land sculpture of the human form in the world. As she's in the north she's inevitably been termed the Lady of the North and, complementing the hard lines of Anthony Gormley's asexual yet still somehow phallic Angel of the North, she too is a collaboration between man and nature, with links to local industry. However, it is as a representation of the land being handed back to Mother Nature that she retains her power as a work of art.