GEOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC ART
This page contains pictures from our recent field trip to Liverpool.
One of the themes we investigated was inner city regeneration. Liverpool is becoming a "24 hour city"; even the Youth Hostel is always open!
This sculpture is in Concert Square, one of many areas that act as a focus for the nightlife for which the city is famous. Cream, the influential club is just around the corner. Does the installation of public art help to stimulate the process of regeneration? If so how?
The sculpture "Super Lamb Banana" is here being controversially ridden by Irfaan Al Rasheed!
To the artist it represents the threat posed by biological engineering to people. Why is it sited in the current location by the Albert Dock? A closer look at the photo below reveals that the building behind the sculpture was Joseph Lamb and Sons, a marine outfitters. This building, like many others in the area, is changing in use as the docks are redeveloped - it seems to me that the sculpture could represent these urban changes.
"A case history" is a wonderful sculpture that is situated on Hope Street in Liverpool. Here the public art has a migration theme, the sculpture apparently representing the many thousands of people who left Liverpool for Ireland and North America.
Each suitcase is cast in concrete and one is supposed to be based on one of Paul McCartney's guitar case. The siting of the sculpture outside the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts reminds us that Liverpool's regeneration is in part culturally -led.
With acknowledgements to Janet Fox and Vivien Speake whose article in Teaching Geography April 2000 featured these art works in an article on culturally led regeneration which informed our own field trip.