Kirkwall Markers
Public art proposal to create a contemporary addition to this conservation town centre
Commissioned by Orkney Islands Council as part of the Kirkwall Townscape Heritage Initiative. Kirkwall Markers is a new public art project for Kirkwall, Orkney.
Connecting the town’s heritage to contemporary processes and materials, we are working with cut steel and powder coating to allow for the addition of rich colour to the existing streetscape of Kirkwall whilst still ensuring a respectful and sensitive response.
Bold shapes and patterns drawn out from archival research, and created though workshops carried out with over a hundred local schoolchildren, connect a series of sites and their histories and settings.
Decorative and everyday objects from across the local history of Kirkwall and wider Orkney will be condensed and combined to create new designs and structures for the Kirkwall Markers and will provide a pattern book for the area.
Artworks are proposed to work with local specific requirements, including to meet the needs of the Kirkwall Ba’, an annual mass street football game which has been played in the town centre for at least three centuries. This is an examples of a medieval football game played on Christmas Day and New Year's Day (except where those fall on a Sunday). As many as 350 men can join the game and this has significant impact on the location and type of public artwork that is suitable for Kirkwall. Working with that restriction we proposed wall based and 2-D works based on graphic patterns and hung above head height to minimise their potential risk to the Ba’.
New works would be fabricated with local expertise from boat builders and existing industry based along the coast from Kirkwall to minimise material challenges with a remote site.
Client: Orkney Islands Council
Location: Kirkwall, Orkney