Hometown Showcase: Greater Sudbury and the Temporary Jesus Head Fiasco!

We all have things we are proud of and disgraced of about our hometowns. I think this is a fun idea for the #TeamCanada and #TeamAustralia communities to get to know each others a bit more.


Source I'm sure you want to know WFT this is all about!

I'm going to start it off with a disgraceful and hilarious incident from last year, that I still laugh about to this day and love showing off to people that never heard about the story. They did say at the time that it had made international news although I kind of doubt it, but here's my chance to confirm or deny this story so please let me know if you heard about this.


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So anyways we have a downtown area that can be a bit rough (like every city I'm sure). So one of the churches has a statue of Mary and Baby Jesus (above) and vandals routinely break the head off this poor thing. The church often had to pick it up from the ground and reattached it, but one day someone stole the head and the poor statue went headless for many months while the church tried to raise money to replace the head.

Then last year about this time actually, a local artist offered to make a replacement head for the church and they though it sounded like a great idea so they accepted and shortly after this head was presented and installed on the statute.


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It was always meant to be temporary and that's why it was done in terracotta clay. The artist was planning to explore stone carving more to prepared for the final piece as she had never worked with that medium before.


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The only problem was people didn't really like it. They kinda though it looked grotesque and wasn't a very good representation of Baby Jesus.


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So some people thought this was pretty funny and there was even an Instagram account called "temporaryjesushead". Where they photoshop this head into movie images and popular Canadian images. I'm going to post a couple from that account below. There are many more and it's worth checking out.


tempjesushead.png
tempjesushead3.png

Anyways the terracotta started to melt and decay in the rain and it was staining the rest of the statue so it had to be removed and it was returned to the artist. The good news is that from all the publicity the story generated, the real head was returned to the church and re affixed to the statue once and for all.

I hope you liked this little story from my hometown, hopefully you enjoyed it and if you want to know more about Sudbury I can certainly share some other interesting stuff. I would like to encourage others to share a bit about their hometowns for everyone else. I think it's a great way to see the world and learn a bit off the beaten path.

I was inspired by @scooter77 from #teamaustralia and his showcase of some small towns in Australia that he has been too.


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