Bridlington’s current Promenade is a result of a major refurbishment completed in 1998, and involving artists Bruce McLean & Mel Gooding and architects Bauman Lyons. Their innovative redesign project took a truly integrated approach, where architect and artist collaborated from the outset, backed by the local authority. The book Promenade – An Architectural Collaboration for Bridlington is a great documentation of the project complemented by insightful essays on the culture of British seaside, seaside architecture and ‘art at the edge between land and sea’.
It’s a scary thing to create artwork that will sit alongside the creations of such ‘A-list’ artists! Rest assured I have thought long and hard about my proposals and made maximum effort to ensure my work will be deserving of its position!
I have taken an approach that hopefully will result in an artwork that resonates harmoniously with themes and ideas in that earlier scheme, whilst taking care not to replicate. I have intended the way my artwork incorporates reflections of sea, sky and land to work with their elemental themes of Water, Wind and Sand, and for the gently curved lines of my Three Brothers imagery to complement the pared down forms of Bruce McLean’s imagery.
Mel Gooding’s wonderful text piece The Nautical Mile includes historical fact and poetic elements, and elicits interaction through it’s ‘look/see/do’ suggestions. Whilst considering the use of text within my own work I’ve been careful to take a complementary approach that is different from Gooding’s in both form and content. My use of text extracted from photographs of the seafront, collected on 1st May 2013, the first day of the bathing season, gives a snapshot of current seafront life through ‘found’ words, letters and numbers. And changing in response to the constantly varying light levels and colours of the weather, my artwork will also be interactive…
headworks 