Philip Key talks to the artist picked to put St Helens on the international map

WHEN Spanish artist Jaume Plensa walked to the top of a hill to see where his latest art work would be situated, he was flabbergasted. “It’s such a strong and amazing place,”he exclaimed.

Plensa has been around the world creating art and visited some special places. But nothing quite prepared him for St Helens.

It was here on the site of the former Sutton Manor Colliery, overlooking the M62, that Plensa would be creating his latest piece of public art, one aimed at putting St Helens on the map and marking the gateway to Merseyside.

As the Liverpool Daily Post revealed yesterday, the work is part of Channel 4’s Big Art Project in which seven selected sites across Britain will each get a major piece of public art.

Originally, there were to be only six but organisers were so impressed by the determination of the people of St Helens to be involved that they were added to the list.

The choice of Plensa as the man to create the work is certain to give its project one of the highest profiles.

Based in Barcelona – where he was born – and Paris, Jaume Plensa has in the last decade become one of the most important artists involved in public art.

“Well, I have had around 40 commissions around the world,” he explains from his Barcelona studio. “The most celebrated is Millennium Park in Chicago.”

For this, he photographed 1,000 faces in Chicago and projected them on two specially built 50ft towers. Below trickled a small moat.

This turned out to be one of the most remarkable fountains ever seen. At 12-minute intervals, a face purses his or her lips and a jet of water emerges from the mouth, just like a 21st Century gargoyle.

It may have been late and costs escalated but it quickly became one of Chicago’s best-loved landmarks.

In Gateshead at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, he created Blake in Gateshead, a laser beam that at given times heads for the skies; in Jacksonville, there were six shining figures at a sports arena and a giant neon sign naming almost all the continents at Toronto’s airport.

For the moment, Plensa is not revealing too much about his design on the site of the old colliery in St Helens.

It will involve light, he admits, something of a signature for his art works and has the working title “Ex Terra Lucem” – out of the earth comes light. “The main intention is to create a landmark at the top of the field that will be visible from the M62,” says Plensa. But he is conscious that what he creates will be more than a mere landmark. “As you know, it was a colliery so as well as being visible it will create a reference about what went on there before. Mining was not only a job, it was something more. It should also be looking out to the future, so it will have to be strong in terms of content.”

He knows that organisers were talking to a number of artists before he was selected for the project. “I was asked if I would like to work on a site like that and I visited with them last April and, of course, I said yes. It is an extraordinary place for a piece, quite fantastic and you can see all around.” When he works on a piece of public art, he closely studies the brief and then goes to visit. “It was important meeting the community and a group of miners,” he says.

Then it is back to the studio and finally developing more concrete ideas. He hopes to have a meeting in Barcelona in August when “everything will be clarified and the final project fixed”.

Although he is not himself an architect, Plensa has worked with architects including Norman Foster: “together we created a fantastic piece in the Italian Alps”.

But he does require the help of a “good structural engineer to ensure everything is fine”.

He is still working on his smaller gallery and museum pieces and for that it is purely his own imagination.

“Public art, however, has to be linked to a specific site or community and that’s a big responsibility. It has to be useful even in its poetic aspects for a group of people and perfectly integrated into a site.

“It will, of course, have my personality which is why they choose one artist over another. But even with my personality, I have to integrate everything with the community.

“You know, every time I do a public piece, I like to fall in love. It is always a shock when you first visit a site and then there are several weeks brainstorming realising the best way to find a link between your personality and the personality of the site.

“That is a beautiful time and even in the darkness, you are trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel. For me St Helens was a stronger shock than usual, it was such a tremendous site, so amazing. It is also filled with memories, not only visual, and I would like to combine all that in terms of content.”

Another new experience for the 52-year-old artist is having a television crew following him around, filming every aspect of the project for a Channel 4 film.

He has already been filmed in his study in Barcelona and they went with him to Chicago to see his Millennium Park fountain.

“I think it will be an interesting experience to see something like this filmed from beginning to end. It will help people to understand the process of each artist and their relationships with their sites (other places involved are Burnley, the Isle of Mull, Newham in East London, Belfast, Cardigan in Wales and cooling towers in Sheffield.

Plensa does not seem to mind the cameras. “It was a bit embarrassing at first,” he says, “but I have the good luck to have the same cameraman, a nice guy and experienced person who has a tremendous ability to be transparent, the invisible man. I forget he is there.”

Plensa was travelling again the day after we met, first to Antibes in France for an exhibition at the Picasso Gallery and then on to Chicago and Vancouver. He likes travelling. Earlier he had jetted from St Helens straight to Tokyo: “They are completely the opposite places but sometimes it helps to go to the opposite and helps you go deeper into things.”

He admits he is working on a tight schedule for the St Helens project. “The intention is to have it ready by April 2008 and I hope we can be on time,” he declares.

philkey