Public Art training - By Sheilagh Holmes
27 April 2009
I was in Manchester again recently, running the latest in A+M’s series of training events for the DART project. This time it was ‘Public Art Commissions’ and the course participants were local authority arts development officers and artists with a range of artforms. The trainer was Sam Wilkinson of InSite Arts who has an impressive depth and breadth of experience in this field. As an introduction, everyone spoke briefly about an example of public art they knew and why it succeeded or failed. The chosen ones were all new pieces of visual art - no old statues on plinths – and most were from Greater Manchester and the North West: the ‘Tree of Remembrance’ by Wolfgang Buttress and Fiona Heron in Piccadilly Gardens; ‘Marge and Steel’ by Marcela Livingstone and Liam Curtin in Cadishead; ‘B of the Bang’ by Thomas Heatherwick Studio at the Manchester Stadium; ‘Coming Full Circle’ by Chris Drury in Irwell, and Anthony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ on Morecambe beach. This exercise set the tone for the day, as we went on to look at the role of public art, commission briefs, proposals, what can go wrong (e.g. siting in an inappropriate location, over-ambitious engineering, lack of maintenance), and what makes for success (e.g. early involvement of artists, community engagement, agreement and clarity of purpose). As ever with this course, my abiding thought is of the extraordinary impact that imaginative and well planned public art can have on all who experience it. This can be clusters of small-scale and ephemeral works, as well as permanent, monumental ones. Neville Gabie’s work with the former Middlesborough Football Club ground and at Cabot Circus construction site in Bristol were two examples of this.
InSite Arts has a number of beautiful books on various public art projects – see its publications webpage for details.