The steel artworks include patterns of the nature along the path. These include Turtle Dove, Kingfisher, Lapwing, Dragonfly, Hare, Stickleback, Water Vole, Muntjac Deer and a variety of butterflies and plants.
Rather than tell the story using the traditional means of flat interpretation panels we decided to create a bit of mystery and allow for a degree of self interpretation.
You have to work a little bit harder to understand what is going on - a little bit like being immersed in nature - you have to look and see before fully understanding what is going on.
It is such a simple way of telling a story in fact and allows the artwork to help sit in the landscape as a natural piece of story telling.
The method of creation follows the same interpretative path as a traditional interpretation panel. The same level of research and conceptual thinking. We start with a lot of reading and understanding of place before settling on a solution. In this case the client was a big influence on this and Sustrans had done a lot work already with their patterns to get a sense of what was required. They then presented us with a draft proposal for us to begin thinking of a solution that met their brief.
From this beginning we presented a series of concepts and ideas based on their work and our further research.
Further refinement of the ideas took place once the client was satisfied that the concepts met their brief and we then took visualised the concepts in the landscape.
Once the ideas were agreed we prepared the artwork using a combination of pencil, iPad and iMac. Ultimately the artworks were passed through to the structural engineer for calculations and foundation design and then to the fabricator. The pieces were installed by local contractor - countryside contracts - who were careful and professional in their handling of the artworks.
