Abstract

Sponsored by Open Culture UK, The Liverpool Map is a permanent public sculpture for the new Museum of Liverpool. It explores the geographical, historical and multicultural boundaries of the city. This collaborative project is a concept for a ‘multi-layered glass monolith’ that was equally a literal map and a visual narrative of Liverpool. The ‘ethno/graphic’ method blends approaches inspired by ethnography for a concept development with innovative methods for fabricating a large-scale glass sculpture. The work invited the participation of the people of Merseyside in its development through web-based surveys and an event that collected their handwritten contributions to a printed ‘community layer’ within the map. The work was realized using unique fabrication methods on a large-scale kiln-formed glass sculpture. Printed layers of transparent glass reveal different interpretations of a map through the montage of images and text, overlaid with precision cut contours of streets and bodies of water. Fused into six 100-kilo standing glass blocks, imagery can be seen from both sides. The sculpture was then created over a two-year period of technical development, prototyping, and fabrication.