Make Way
A new public artwork for South City Way - a major new cycle infrastructure for Glasgow - co-designed with the Gorbals community
South City Way is a new cycle route connecting the city centre of Glasgow with the area directly south of the river Clyde. Known as the Southside, this area is an increasingly popular place to live, work and visit. New homes and independent businesses, along with a burgeoning sense of community, provide the area with a vibrant and energetic character.
South City Way will link Queen's Park, and the residential neighbourhoods that surround it, with the city centre - less than two miles away.
We were commissioned by Sustrans to create an artwork celebrating the new route and engaging local communities in the commitment to active and sustainable travel that it represents.
In comparison to the bustling high street of Victoria Road that precedes it, the section of the route where our artwork was to be located lacks activation.
It is a place typically passed through at speed - on a bus or a bike, on on foot. It isn’t a place where people gather.
We decided to play with tricks of visual perception, imagining how an artwork might change if it were passed by at speed.
Engaging local children in the process, we explored low tech ways of creating animation - with thaumascopes and kaleidoscopes.
We created a kit of simple two dimensional shapes that could be arranged in three dimensions. Participants were invited to pick five, and to arrange them as they liked - and to consider how a design might be viewed from different angles.
This process was fun and engaging - and cemented our approach to creating the artwork.
We decided it was time to scale the shapes up and to take them on site, holding drop in sessions timed to catch commuters. We offered free bike repairs, tea and cake, and the chance to learn more about the project.
After the on-site day we worked to finalise our designs. The process of co-design led had influenced us in ways we hadn't anticipated. In particular we were finding ourselves drawn to the colour combinations from the children's models - originally selected from what stock paper was available to us.
We worked with Sculpture and Design, a specialist artwork fabricator, to explore the boundaries of what was possible within our budget. We wanted to make sure we were using all available resource, making optimum use of standard sheet metal sizes to avoid wastage.
We launched Make Way with a day of fun activities for the community, inviting along the children whose enthusiasm had shaped the design and characterised the project for us.
South City Way will complete later in 2020, but Make Way is already being enjoyed as people walk, cycle and ride to and from the city centre.
Client: Sustrans
Location: Glasgow, UK
Completion: 2019