Sculpture for site adjacent to the historic shipyards of Birkenhead.
Stainless Steel, , 9m x 4.5m x 3m
In Autumn 1999, I was approached by Hamilton Quarter Regeneration Initiative and CMA Architects to make a piece of sculpture for a new retail park in Birkenhead. The commissioner was Henry Boot Developments who were building the Rock Retail Park
The Rock retail park is situated next to Cammell Laird shipyards. Historically this has been one of the most important centres for shipbuilding in Great Britain, although i the late Twentieth century its fortunes declined, like much heavy industry in the North West of England.
I saw this commission as an opportunity to make a new piece of work that explored some sculptural ideas I’d been exploring for a while – interdependency and the relation of individual forms to a greater whole.
I wanted to capture something of the monumental industrial architecture of Birkenhead and I also wanted to say something about the state of the urban environment in England at the turn of the 21st century. Retail Parks are a common part of our cityscape, but in my view they degrade our towns and cities, contributing to the running down of town centres, the destruction of buildings and established street patterns, isolating communities and increasing our dependency on cars. By contrast, the Birkenhead shipyards are a huge physical presence, integral to the development of the town and a direct tangible link to its history and importance on the world stage. I wanted to make something unusual, new and strange, but which echoed the forms that had been built nearby for centuries.
The sculpture takes as its starting point the ribs of a ship’s hull, with the hull itself missing. I am interested in the way that suggested forms can be more powerful than those that are complete or intact. I also wanted to capture something of the melancholic beauty of this great shipbuilding town, which retains many of the buildings and structures of its bygone glory days but has lost much of the outer fabric which binds them together and gives them purpose. The movement of the seven elements can be seen as either bowing down under the great weight of historical change or unfurling and reaching up to the future, depending on which way you look at it.
I made the whole sculpture myself with assistant Palli Kristjansson at my Salford Studio. The forms were plasma-cut from 3mm Stainless Steel sheet then formed, assembled, welded, ground smooth, sanded and polished.
