Penmaenmawr, North Wales.

Sculptural typography in Stainless Steel for the Park of the Big House.

In 2001 I was commissioned by Cywaith Cymru. Artworks Wales to design and make an entrance piece for Parc Plas Mawr a new park in Penmaenmawr.

I’m interested in the relationship between language and a sense of cultural identity and Welsh is a beautiful and ancient language, and still very much the living language of North Wales.  The name of the park means ‘Park of the Big House’ in Welsh, and is on the site of the big house which once belonged to the Darbyshires, the family who were the landowners and main employers in this quarrying town, situated between the rugged Cambrian mountains and the sea.  The house is long gone and the park has been built on these formerly private grounds for the benefit of both residents and visitors to this beautiful part of the North Wales coast.

For this commission, I designed and made a sculptural-typographic composition, based around two newly designed fonts.  Each of the 12 letters was extruded into a 3 dimensional form, and the two sets of letters – upper and lower case – aligned at right-angles to each other. One set is designed to be seen by pedestrians and the other by drivers – the letterforms unfolding and recombining as the viewer travels along the Old Bangor Road.

I made the piece in my Salford Studio – plasma cutting, welding and polishing the Stainless steel with the help of assistant Trevor Rising.