The art of shopping in the city centreIt is hard to imagine Michael-Angelo being inspired to sculpt David while
fighting over a powder blue cashmere sweater hanging on a sales rack.
In the many accounts of Caravaggio’s life there is no mention of
him laying down his easel for a quick trip to the High Street to pick
up a new pair of 501’s.
Shopping centres are as unlikely to inspire an artist to create as the
smell of apple sauce is to encourage a piglet to overeat. Yet Liverpool’s
newest addition to the retail scene is doing just that.
Milligan, developer of the Met Quarter on Victoria Street, wants to create
a shopping experience that will befit the city’s upcoming Capital
of Culture status.
It has commissioned a group of artists, based in the Northwest area,
to design a series of work that will help it realise the centre’s
aim of becoming ‘synonymous with the finest design, art and craft
of the region.’
Turner Prize nominee Mel Chantrey has been brought in to oversee the
cultural side of the project, which is due to open at the beginning of
March.
‘Milligan sees arts as an important element of its profile. We’re
treating the whole place like an art gallery so that the art work becomes
an integral part of the building.
‘Shopping’s become about lifestyles. For some people it’s
a real event, it’s a destination. For me going into that place,
even if you just walk through and come out the other end, I hope you’d
be challenged and stimulated in some way,’ he explains.
Mel, 60, has worked on construction projects with Milligan before. He
created the sculpture Arbor, a giant lattice metal artwork, for the Triangle
shopping centre, one of the buildings that marks Manchester’s renaissance
since the devastating IRA bomb blast in June 1996.
As well as co-ordinating the artists at the Met Quarter, he has designed
a 75m-long metal sculpture that flows along the inside of the former post
office building, just below the ceiling. Now completed and put in position,
it is one of the longest suspended sculptures in the world.
‘The opportunities were vast in Liverpool because there’s
a huge expanse which can be quite decorative.I have developed a relationship
with a German manufacturer who make metal sheets and originally I just
wanted to have a huge sheets of it hung like wallpaper but it’s
always a compromise between engineering and aesthetics.
‘I went on holiday and took a whole series of drawings, papers
and materials and I literally filled my room and the corridor with them
all before I had developed the design’ recalls Mel, whose installation
at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, in London, was nominated for
the 1994 Turner Prize.
The sculpture can be lit up in a number of colours to change the atmosphere
of the centre: ‘I wanted to create softness to it, the idea that
of natural draping like cloth. I was a painter for many years so it’s
almost a painterly approach to surfaces and materials, pushing so it becomes
something other than it is and what it was made for.
‘It’s a mood generator in a sense because it can express
different feelings. It’s been lit by a whole array of quite intricate
systems so we can change the mood in the building quite subtly,’
explains Mel, who was born in Hyde and designed the town’s memorial
garden to the victims of the mass murderer GP Harold Shipman.
‘I’m hoping the public will ask themselves what it’s
made of and, how it’s hanging, where does the light come from, how
did they do that.’
Warrington-born artist Sarah Mitch is currently creating a series of
photo-montages to be displayed in the Met Quarter and John Moore’s
University and lecturer Deborah Steggel is producing a 6m x 6m fabric
hanging that will be suspended opposite one of the main entrances.
All the furniture ‘ seats and tables ‘ has also been designed
specially for the shopping centre and a group and a group of JMU students
has drawn up plans for a chandelier that will form a focal point of the
development.
‘There is quite a close relationship and between artists and so
all work is integrated.
‘There’s a superb hanging that Debbie Steggel’s created
that will connect spaces on the first floor. It leaps from the stair space
perpendicular to the wall and across the roof space in one flowing movement,’
says Mel.
‘The whole project is about making things visible but locked in
as part of the fabric of the building.
‘It’s really a cultural generator, as well as providing a
venue for people to buy high fashion. ‘There’s a performance
space and provision for drawing all the furniture back and creating a
space there. There are plans afoot to bring in local artists.’
The building work is now in its final stages with the rest of the artworks
due to be installed in the New Year.