FOUR leading international artists have revealed their proposals for a major landmark artwork on the Lake District Coast.
The project is part of a new public art programme entitled Deep Time: Commissions for the Lake District Coast.
It is commissioned by Copeland Borough Council, and all the participants have spent time in Cumbria to develop plans for new large-scale permanent artworks that actively reflect aspects of its landscape, people and place.
The proposals will go on display as part of a free public exhibition opening at The Beacon Museum in Whitehaven on September 10, lasting until October 9, and travelling onto Windermere Jetty Museum from October 20 until November 20.
The visiting public will be able to study and comment on the proposals, and the judging panel will then decide which artwork will receive core funding.
Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s proposal 'Your daylight destination' unites earth, sky, and ocean in a monumental outdoor artwork and optical illusion in the tidal flats of Copeland.
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Devised with internationally best-selling author Robert Macfarlane and inspired by the 'cup-and-ring' form of prehistoric rock art found in the area, it centres around an elliptical steel basin that stretches out thirty metres into the mud flats of the intertidal zone.
Twice a day, at high tide, the basin is submerged entirely, so that water is collected and remains in the basin once the tide has gone out again.
The resulting pool acts like a mirror, reflecting the sky in its surface.
Seen at a specific distance and angle from a purpose-built circular viewing platform that features a series of rings mounted on stands, the rings appear in alignment as concentric circles that frame a perfectly circular 'borrowed' view of the sky surrounded by sand.
Turner Prize-winning British artist Rachel Whiteread's proposal extends her practice of transforming everyday settings, objects, and surfaces into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar.
The proposed piece at Drigg, near Sellafield, responds to an abandoned, unassuming, corrugated building by casting an interior replica to create a concrete facsimile adjacent and parallel to the original.
This eerie double presence, one very similar to the other, plays on the supposed temporary nature of the original structure, which will eventually disappear leaving only the facsimile as a quiet and secretive presence in the landscape and a navigational marker for seafarers.
Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf is the creative lead on an international collective including a philosopher, sound designer, AI artist and filmmaker, who together have proposed 'SEED', an immersive garden and AI experience which deconstructs a garden by isolating the underlying components - the sights, sounds and scents - and reconfiguring them within a new sunken pavilion on a disused quarry site.
Designed by vPPR architects, the pavilion houses an immersive audio-visual installation featuring recordings of Oudolf's responses to sites on the West Cumbria coast.
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An algorithm feeds into the audio and visual elements of the installation in an ever-changing, seasonally fluctuating, and self-generative way.
Within the pavilion, different interior spaces offer distinct acoustic qualities, leading onto an open courtyard garden designed by Oudolf as a microcosm of the area's natural flora.
The partially submerged pavilion references the area’s rich mining history, weaving in oral histories from locals and visitors.
British artist Roger Hiorns has teamed up with Tom Emerson from 6a architects to consider the divided legacy of the iron industry on the West Cumbrian coast by proposing an artwork that transforms a slag heap at Millom into a precise sculptural form.
Working solely with materials that already exist on the site, the process of transformation includes creating a vast new rectangular slope rising eastwards towards the nearby lake into which a grid of holes are drilled.
Over time, the holes will self-seed and the artwork will soften and attune to its environment, turning this waste site into a landmark and climate register.
The result is both a timeless form when seen at a distance, and an object hiding in plain sight that can be walked over by visitors.
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