I’m Excited to Have Received A New Public Art Commission

I’m excited to have received a new Public Art commission from Legacy WM, as part of a new inner city Arts and Heritage Trail in Birmingham, UK. The first of two commissions, celebrates the Midland Sailing Club @Edgbaston Reservoir. Having spent some time researching the unique history of Edgbaston Reservoir in my previous commission, ‘From Summerfield to Paradise’ for Roundhouse, Birmingham, I had some research to build on to begin. As part of the design process, I’ve lead community engagement workshops with Midland Sailing Club members and even been out on the rescue boat to watch and photograph one of the Sailing races, held regularly at the club, nippy weather but fun!

The Sailing Club has a rich history in itself and further visits to the  archives @Wolfson Centre, Library of Birmingham, unearthed some great material I hadn’t seen previously – It’s great to be able to access these archives again, following the lockdown. I decided to approach the design as a panorama. The reservoir is unique in this sense, an inner city treasure, well used by the local community, as it has been for generations. It’s flanked by the central Birmingham cityscape on one side and a very natural environment on the other, making it a unique environment for sailing specifically. One club member said, due to these conditions, ‘If you can sail here, you can sail anywhere!’ In the design, I aimed to capture and represent this unique environment, combining heritage and contemporary imagery within the design – quite a challenge!

Having developed my creative digital skills and incorporating new technologies over the past few years and capitalising my membership @STEAMhouse maker space, I’ve decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and approach the commission in a new way, creating a ‘digital mosaic’ using photography, water jet cut tiles, digitally printed and fired, installing into an aluminium tray. I visited Oliver Budd of Budd Mosaics, a long standing colleague and amazing second generation mosaic artist (son of Kenneth Budd) a prolific Mosaic Artist, who created many Birmingham Public Art Mosaics in the 70’s) He generously shared his methods of installing into aluminium trays using epoxy resins and it’s this approach I will be using on this commission.

For now, I’ve uploaded some images from the creative engagement workshops at the sailing club, thanks so much to Radhika Muthanna for her photography – I’ll share some heritage imagery in my next post. It’s so hard to choose from these, there’s so much fantastic material to work with!