Reviewing the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
While at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery I encountered an exhibition called Birmingham Big Art Project. The idea behind the project is to imagine a major piece of art that would reflect and show Birmingham's challenging and exciting environment and create a permanent piece of public art that puts all of Birmingham many layers in to artwork. Furthermore the project wanted the artists involved to translate the ideas of the city in to tangible objects or experiences for it public to interact with.
I enjoyed this exhibition due to the variety of ideas put forward and the fact that some of the sculptures are more interact-able than others. My favorites are Small Giants because of my interest in jewelry making and the fact the will be a rang of wearables that can be bought aswell as the sculpture its self or Station Clock due to the artwork being more interact-able and having an audio-able feature, however all the ideas put forward are incredible.
Heather and Ivan Morison – Blueprint for Happiness
‘Blueprint for Happiness’ is derived from the perfect colliding cuboid geometries of minerals created deep beneath the earth. Its intricate gleaming facets represent a realignment of the many layers of Birmingham’s long history into a new geometry for the future. It is a sculpture that holds within it the pure potentiality of an entire city and a metaphor for the radical free thinking that made Birmingham. It is a statement of intent for a city of the future, in a world where the only constant is change.
Keith Wilson – Industrial Revolution
Keith Wilson proposes a slow moving public sculpture that will travel from one end of Eastside City Park to the other over the next ten years. Birmingham’s history of labour and the transportation of materials is here reinvented as a post-industrial ‘art’ quadriga for the carrying of culture. The pair of wavy lines on its sides is derived from the tactile sign for ‘art’, a brainwave marking a culturally shared history of invention. The lines echo Egyptian entrance markers that were carved in relief to represent water, land and sky.
Roger Hiorns – As yet untitled
Roger Hiorns proposes a landscape of transformed engines both large and small. The steam train engine in the Think Tank collection is 3D scanned, transformed and modeled in stone. The train’s exterior shell is rendered to resemble human skin and is set amongst a scattered collection of stone car engines. Hiorns further proposes a third form of a full-size 27 metre-long locomotive train. The image of the locomotive in bodily transition is proposed by the artist as a symbol of the shaping of our sexual and physical identities by technology.
Susan Philipsz – Station Clock
Susan Philipsz’s proposal is an aural clock. The clock will stand as a monument to time: past, present and future. It will comprise of twelve digits like any clock but each of the digits will represent a tone from the twelve tones of the musical scales. The sounds of ‘Station Clock’ will be made by the population of Birmingham and be produced in collaboration with the Birmingham Conservatoire. The tones will sound very low overnight and will be fuller sounding during the day, culminating in a large chorus at noon. For this 1:25 scale version the clock will sound every five minutes instead of every hour.
Brian Griffiths – Small Giants
Brian Griffiths’ public artwork is a sculpture that can be worn by the city of Birmingham and its people. He proposes to work with a select group of craftspeople from the Jewellery Quarter to produce a series of bespoke pieces of jewellery which will be made available to the public, as well as being translated onto Eastside City Park as a giant glorious sculpture.
Furthermore the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a wide range of contents from the Staffordshire horde to more modern and contemporary art. This helps attract a wider range of people to come see its work and gives a more comprehensive history of art. Below are some more works of art from the museum i found interesting.
