The Gretna Landmark Trust has announced Cecil Balmond as the winning artist for the Gretna Landmark’s competition to design “the Great Unknown”. Cecil has been chosen to work with internationally renowned architectural critic, land artist and designer Charles Jencks to realise an ambitious large scale project of integrated sculptural form and landscape that celebrates and explores the border crossing into Scotland at Gretna.

Andrew Dixon, selection panelist and chief executive of Creative Scotland says,

Cecil Balmond’s outline proposal will combine artistic vision and engineering to produce a landmark that is rooted in Scotland’s scientific contribution to the world. The project will provide millions of future visitors with an iconic welcome and an ever changing contemporary symbol of a confident, creative Scotland.

THE PROPOSAL

The Star of Caledonia (working title) is Cecil Balmond’s response to the “the Great Unknown”. It is a project of form and landscape, and is the result of a fully integrated collaborative effort between Cecil Balmond and Charles Jencks. Creative director Charles Jencks describes the work:

Crossing the border to Scotland, across the River Sark, is now a passage obscured under a bridge by cars travelling at speed. Instead of marking this with motorway signs we are using a landform and sculpture that pulls together the adjacent site, the distant hills and the Solway.

Nestled into the curving mound and springing from it is Cecil Balmond’s whirling creation. In one sense, it is a scintillating piece of calligraphy seen against the sky which will signify various meanings as you approach – starburst, energy, St. Andrew’s Cross, thistle, Highland Dancing, etc – or, if you look at the right place, the ‘map of Scotland’. It all depends from where you see it in the landscape. These meanings emerge dramatically as you walk the site, but they are also taken up by the landform and embedded in its curves.

Over the next several months Cecil and I will work to make these aspects more resolved, we respect each other, and are both inspired by the challenge of coming up with a set of dynamic elements fitting for Scotland – we hope!

The Star was born out of an idea by Balmond to capture the powerful energy, scientific heritage and magnetic pull of Scotland. Balmond’s design pays particular homage to Scottish innovation and particularly James Clerk Maxwell, the pre-eminent Scottish physicist, and mathematician noted for his groundbreaking work in electromagnetic theory. It was Maxwell who first said that light was energy and paved the way for Einstein and the other great thinkers of our modern world. Cecil Balmond explains:

The Star of Caledonia is a Welcome; its kinetic form and light paths a constant trace of Scotland’s power of invention. And I am delighted to be collaborating with Charles Jencks to create an integrated idea of this concept in both landscape and form.

REGIONAL IMPACT

The Star of Caledonia supports an image of a dynamic, innovative, outward-looking region that is capable of attracting and offering both investment and talent. More than five million vehicles travel north and south each year, yielding a potential audience of ten million people who will be able to experience the England-Scotland Border Crossing.

The Gretna Landmark is an important flagship project for the Gretna area and has the potential to be a powerful catalyst for the development of Gretna-Lockerbie-Annan as a national gateway to Scotland. The designs have been likened to the stars and highlights the Dumfries and Galloway Region’s Dark Skies Park status.

The initiative is supported by Dumfries & Galloway Arts, the community of Gretna, Gretna Green and Springfield, Alasdair Houston of the Gretna Green Group, Dumfries & Galloway Council, Scottish Enterprise and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

The next steps for Wide Open and The Gretna Landmark are to secure funding for the further design and implementation of the Star of Caledonia, hopefully in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2014.

Please see www.gretnalandmark.com for more information about the background to the project.

Click here for a BBC video coverage, with images of the design.

You can also read the BBC article Ian Rankin on Scotland’s new landmark in which Scottish author Ian Rankin offers his assessment of the Star of Caledonia.

Image: The Star of Caledonia by Cecil Balmond