Public art examples: what a finished UK commission actually looks like
Public art examples are most useful read backwards, as evidence of a decision somebody made in a meeting rather than as a gallery of favourites, and five well documented UK commissions between them demonstrate almost every decision a first time commissioner will face: the Angel of the North in Gateshead, Another Place on Crosby Beach, the Kelpies at Falkirk, Dream in St Helens, and the Fourth Plinth programme in Trafalgar Square. Each is described here for what it teaches about the process, not for what it looks like, and each is a work you can go and stand in front of, which is the only way to judge whether it succeeds.
What a finished commission is evidence of
A finished commission is evidence of four things that were settled long before fabrication: who controlled the site, where the money came from, how the artist was chosen, and who agreed to look after the result. Photographs show none of those. When a commissioner looks at an existing work and says “something like that”, they are usually pointing at an outcome that was produced by a funding route and a site they do not have.
| Work | Where | What it demonstrates |
|---|---|---|
| Angel of the North, Antony Gormley | Gateshead | Engineering and consent drive a landmark commission, and local opposition before installation is normal |
| Another Place, Antony Gormley | Crosby Beach, Sefton | A work’s intended duration can change, and changing it is a planning decision |
| The Kelpies, Andy Scott | Falkirk | Scale is a structural problem before it is an artistic one |
| Dream, Jaume Plensa | St Helens | A site’s history and its community can genuinely determine the commission |
| The Fourth Plinth | Trafalgar Square, London | A permanent programme of temporary works is a different instrument from a permanent object |
Permanent landmarks: the Angel of the North and the Kelpies
Permanent landmarks demonstrate, more clearly than any other type, that the artistic decision is bounded by an engineering one. The Angel of the North, by Antony Gormley, was completed in 1998 beside the A1 south of Gateshead. It stands around 20 metres tall, roughly 66 feet, with a wingspan of about 54 metres, and it is made of weathering steel, which forms a stable rust layer and is chosen precisely so that nobody has to repaint it. A figure of that size in that exposure is a wind loading problem, and the foundation and structural design consumed a serious share of the effort that a visitor never sees.
It is also the standard UK example of a commission that was widely opposed locally before it was built and widely claimed locally afterwards. That sequence is common enough that a commissioner should plan for it: the consultation stage will not produce enthusiasm, and enthusiasm, where it arrives at all, arrives years after installation.
The Kelpies, by Andy Scott, were completed in 2013 at the Helix park in Falkirk. The two horse heads stand 30 metres high, close to 100 feet, in steel. At that scale the artist’s drawing has to survive translation into a structural frame, a cladding system and an erection sequence involving cranes and road closures, and the commission necessarily becomes a construction project with an artist leading the design rather than an artwork with some engineering attached. Artists approaching this scale for the first time consistently underestimate how much of the programme belongs to the fabricator.
A work whose duration changed: Another Place
Another Place, also by Antony Gormley, consists of 100 cast iron figures, each taken from the artist’s own body, distributed along Crosby Beach in Sefton and out into the tidal zone, so that the sea covers and uncovers them twice a day. It arrived at Crosby in 2005 having previously been shown elsewhere in Europe, and it was intended to move on again. A later decision by the local authority allowed it to stay.
That is the single most instructive fact about it for a commissioner. The duration stated at the outset is not fixed, and changing it is a formal process, not a shrug: it required a planning decision, and it converted a temporary loan into a permanent maintenance liability in a highly corrosive environment. Any commissioner installing a temporary work in a place people come to like should decide, in the brief, what happens if the answer to “can it stay?” turns out to be yes.
A site that determined the commission: Dream
Dream, by Jaume Plensa, was completed in 2009 at Sutton Manor in St Helens, on the site of a former colliery, and it takes the form of an elongated head of a young woman with her eyes closed, about 20 metres tall, in white concrete. It was made through a Channel 4 commissioning project, and former miners from the pit were directly involved in selecting the artist.
Two process lessons come out of it. The first is that participation in selection, as opposed to participation in making, changes the commission at the point where it is still cheap to change: the group that chose the artist did not choose the design, but it did choose the sensibility, and it did so before any money was spent on fabrication. The second is that a site with a strong history gives a brief its content. The brief did not have to invent a subject. It had one, and the difficulty was in resisting the obvious version of it.
A programme rather than an object: the Fourth Plinth
The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is a commissioning programme rather than a single work: the plinth was built in the 1840s and stood empty for more than 150 years, and since the late 1990s it has carried a rotating series of temporary commissions, each shown for a limited period, with the programme run by the Mayor of London through a commissioning group.
It is the clearest UK demonstration that a permanent site and a permanent artwork are separable. A commissioner with one prominent location and a recurring modest budget can run a programme instead of buying an object, which spreads risk across many works rather than staking everything on one, gives repeated opportunities to artists at different career stages, and allows a work to be judged and then to leave. The cost is administrative: a programme has to be commissioned again every cycle, and it needs a standing panel, a repeatable brief and a permanent structural base already tested for the loads it will be asked to take.
What these examples cannot tell you
None of these examples tells you what a commission costs, and figures quoted for them in circulation are frequently wrong, mixing artist fee with fabrication, or with the surrounding landscaping and infrastructure, or with the whole regeneration scheme they sat inside. A commissioner budgeting by analogy to a famous work is budgeting from a number that was never a like for like comparison.
They also do not represent typical UK practice. Landmark works are the visible minority. Most public art commissioned in Britain in any year is modest and local: a set of gates, a paved sequence, a school frieze, a mural on a gable end, most of it funded through planning obligations and never photographed by anyone who did not work on it. Judging a first commission against the Angel of the North sets the wrong benchmark for the brief, the budget and the panel.