Artist Commissions

NORTHWICH HOARDING COMMISSION

Project Description 

Commissioned Artists: Performance Poet Dominic Berry & Ultimate Holding Company

As a part of the COLLECT: Live project, Cheshire West and Chester Council in partnership with DAN Community Ltd commissioned Performance Poet Dominic Berry and a studio collective called Ultimate Holding Company to work in collaboration on a community project to create art for a large section of hoarding facing Chester Way dual carriageway in Northwich.  The hoardings surround the building site of the old Law Court and Memorial Hall whilst the new ‘Memorial Court’ Life Style Centre is being constructed. Dominic worked primarily with Witton Church Primary School and several other groups on poetry which was subsequently transformed into a visual design as vinyl transfers onto hoardings. and as signs created to emulate the look of the health and safety signs in primary colours.

BARONS QUAY TRAVELATOR COMMISSION

Project Description

Commissioned Artists: Rebecca Gouldson

Rebecca was short listed along with three other emerging artists to compete on a design for the travelator wall in the new Barons Quay development. The artists were given 6 weeks to research and develop a concept. Rebecca's was the winning bid. She describes her proposal as follows:

"My approach to The Baron’s Quay commission stems from my ongoing fascination with historic industry, evident in several of my commissions and in my recent show at Edinburgh Printmakers gallery, entitled ‘Industrial Shift’. 

I draw inspiration from the beauty of historic Industrial architecture, machinery and tools.  This beauty is often intrinsically linked to their function, both real and imagined.  Sometimes it stems from the subversion of this function when they are abandoned or taken away from their original functional context.  My ‘Industrial Pictorial’ series, pictured in slides 1-3 present ghostly images of decaying industrial structures.  The faded, aged images reveal the buildings’ unconventional beauty.

For the site at Baron’s Quay, I propose a modular, etched metal wall piece that extends across the wall, with the potential for individual elements to project out of the wall in shallow 3D relief.

The design would be developed though research and design development, however at this initial stage, I’m particularly interested in looking at the open industrial structures of the type seen at Anderton lift and also mining rigs and towers. I envisage contrasting these structural patterns with more organic imagery taken from rock salt deposits in cross-sections of the landscape, the microscopic structure of salt, and the patterns of routes or trade networks used by the local industries."