Night Angels

So, here are finished Angels in all their glory. This is my favourite time to see them, especially at this time of year because when you drive back in to Bristol you can see them as you come off the end of the motorway, and the floodlights make them really stand out from the buildings all around them. As they've been up for a while, the office space in between them is now also complete – Bristol City Council's Customer Service Point – so it would be timely to get some shots of them in some lovely crisp, winter sunlight with clear blue skies (yeah, right!) and shiny reflections of the local area now all the hoardings, skips and diggers have gone.

Everytime I come home in the car late and tired, I look out for Pete (my friend who modelled, main panel below) to say 'hello'. It's such a comforting site.

These next ones are Esther and Dameon, just quietly keeping an eye on things. You can see them all as you walk across the new glass bridge into Cabot Circus shopping centre (a very odd feeling, walking past them in the middle of a crowd of people who may or may not be noticing). It would be good to see some daylight photographs as the atmosphere really changes, so I'll try and get some when the sun next comes out. Here's hoping!

Rising Angels Land

8am, a very grim and dark Tuesday morning, with intimidating clouds and a bitter wind whipping around the north-facing wall where tiling of the Angels was to begin. I had agreed to go down with Richard (video-diarist) to record this moment, so we watched and chatted with Andy as he mixed up the tile adhesive and selected the first mosaic panels to apply. As he touched the wall with a swathe of adhesive (remember, it's a north-facing wall), a shaft of sunlight appeared directly on the few square feet where he was working. Panel number 3 went on and the light – really quite bright now – stayed until the second panel went up, and then quietly faded.

And so begins the landing of Rising Angels...

Tiled Vision

This is a great day. The Angel tiles have arrived, and this afternoon I went along to see them. Only one Angel is out of its box so far, pictured above, using no less than 73 pre-prepared sections of mosaic tiling. I walked into the room where it was laid out and stopped in my tracks – it is huge.

Andy, pictured, will be installing the tiles and has been busy laying out the sections and marking up the wall accordingly. This work will commence in the morning as this has been a challenge enough for one day, but I couldn't let today go past without sharing how it felt to be standing with my toes touching the edge of the real article, protective paper covering only conceding a slight glimpse of the coloured squares beneath.

It is real!

"This is America calling"

The tiles are ready! America is flying them in this weekend so the long-awaited Angels finally land on Monday - so the Construction Manager announced on the phone as I was quietly strolling into Cabot Circus – Bristol's new, expensive shopping centre – as it flung open its doors to the public at noon today.

The images, as previously explained, are photographs translated into mosaic tiling and then applied to the walls of a building with industrial grout. Because some of the shapes are very intricate, we are using a waterjet cutting technique to help achieve precise rendering of the photographic detail. This work has been done in the States over the last three months, ever since I signed off the final technical drawings with the architect.

On Monday morning we are expecting a courier to deliver the tiles in Bristol, at which point a special and clever person in safety gear will begin applying the carefully chosen shade of grout and set about piecing together the panels. I will be attending, though am aware I could make this person very nervous so will go armed with chocolate digestives.

The Angel mosaics are being installed on a building right next to Cabot Circus, and as I wandered around watching the credit-crunch-defiant shoppers take in circus displays (how apt), I realised for the first time that my main centre-piece will be visible from the heart of the complex. At this point it seemed appropriate to enjoy one of the nice new wine bars in the neighbourhood and propose a toast with friends.

Monday will be an interesting day as the boxes are opened and we see what we've got – the moment when I see exactly how my small pieces of paper translate into a ginormous mural, and stand open mouthed and without breath while the first sweep of grout gets plastered on to a bare wall...

Angelic Exhibition

Friday, I sat in my car at a little-known beach north of Bude, working out how long I had before a vicious line squall came in across the sea (such is our summer weather). I managed about an hour's drawing on this beach before the wetness rained/reigned and I broke my flip flops running back to the car, easel under arm with a fistful of chalks. This was enough, however, to establish some key thoughts in a new series of drawings I'm working on.

In October, I have a small exhibition in support of the Angels public art piece here in Bristol. The show will comprise drawings, photographs and collage, as well as selected writings from my sketchbooks. The idea is to create emotive and expressive images that take inspiration from landscapes and spaces, and put these together with strong figurative characters to convey some thoughts about the way the angels' messages are delivered.

Preliminary studies prior to this have largely been in black and white, an extension of the small sketches I made while working on the photographic piece last summer. Many of the ideas began as small thumbnails drawn with a brush pen, just registering an essence that could be expanded in the photo studio with models. Now, not being restricted to a medium that must translate effectively into heavily pixelated mosaic, I am able to experiment with different materials, and it's interesting to see what takes shape.

Out with an easel in the elements with refreshingly dirty hands, no battery chargers or technology, this is what dreams are made of! But having collected enough of the elemental vibe to kick start, I am able to complete the drawings in the shelter of home. I hope to spend the next few weeks winding various strands together, so the show should be quite interesting!

Selected work will be exhibited at the Create Centre in Bristol, starting on October 17th with the West Bristol Art Trail, then continuing for three weeks. Please email me for further details.

On Site Sketching

After the last post about my Angels project, I searched through the Lightbox archives and came across a post from last August. It recounts a visit I made to the rubble-strewn building site as visited with Richard recently. Last summer when the project was developing, I went on site to work through ideas and make some decisions about what should go where, as sign-off was required on all the proposed artwork before shoot day. (Follow this link to the original post.)

It's one thing working with images on a small screen, or holding prints in your hands, but when designing for a large space you have to consider the work as a piece of architecture, something which has a physical impact as well as mental/emotional.

It was crucial to get down in the rubble with my sketches and imagine their various tensions or dramas when rendered 14 metres long, rather than 14 centimetres. The space between things in a composition is really important for guiding the viewer around the message, and figuring out how big a gap can be before the journey loses its thread is an interesting exercise. I taped my A4 pages to the walls and–in my mind–scaled them up to gauge how this gap changes with scale.

You can just about see a tiny slip of paper on the wall in this following image – the A4 page I referred to:


In these next shots, I wanted to show how big my sketch book was as I held it, mainly to make a record of the difference before and after, but partly to try and fathom what was going to happen to my normally small-scale work.



This was a great day's work and good to recall, not least for being kitted out in all the regulation safety gear! It was fun padding carefully around a building site – I'm thankful to the Construction Manager who took me under his wing and made sure no cranes fell on my head. But most of all, I loved the sense of being totally, physically engulfed by this work.

All senses present and correct...
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{Related Lightbox post: 'Watch This Space'}

Waiting to Land

I find myself on camera instead of behind it. My friend, Richard, is documenting 'the making of' my big public art commission (as referred to in previous posts both here and on the lightbox).

The project involves creation of five large, mosaic wall panels, to be installed on a building which sits near the end of the M32 in the midst of Bristol's current regeneration programme. This is exciting work, not least for its scale and position.

On the theme of angels, installation of the project is expected sometime in Autumn, although protracted alterations to the schedule have caused the launch date to suffer heavy delays already, and currently there is no new date set–you'll just have to watch this space! In light of this breath-holding wait, Richard and I visited the site as he wanted to record my reactions to the current shape of things.


Although I find it difficult being patient, making pictures of the building site helped me see it is good to hang on until the space is in better shape to receive the goods. There is a sense in which these characters will arrive when they–and we–are ready, and as it is there is a temporary form of art already in situ alongside the rather lovely diggers:



Before we started filming, we had a chance to look through some rushes of my shoot day, when Richard and another friend Roz visited us in the studio and caught some precious moments which will also go into the film. These are treasured memories and good to be restored.


Being the other side of the camera is alright when you're in the right hands, and as Richard knows what questions to prompt with I hope we are making a film that will tell an interesting story and give us the chance to reflect well on how the angels came in to land. It's been a significant journey.

Further details can be unveiled as we draw near to completion on this project – a long and patient time coming!