Over the Easter holidays Tate Liverpool will be giving over its ground floor gallery to The Great Green Sculpture Challenge – a fun way to bring together recycling and art. From 4-17 April artist Graham Marsden will inspire visitors to build their own statuesque sculptures out of recycled materials. Building on the success of previous den making workshops, children from 5 years of age (and adults with bags of imagination) will be able to construct a new world populated by sculptures of trees, people and building. Visitors will then be encouraged to decorate and adorn their sculptures. The Great Green Sculpture Challenge is free.
All sculptures will be made out of rubbish that would normally be thrown away. Visitors are invited to bring along their clean plastic containers, bags and newspapers and transform them into a something beautiful and artistic. Gaskells Waste, who recycle as much as possible from the waste generated at Tate Liverpool, will also be providing clean recycled materials for use in The Great Green Sculpture Challenge, and once the event has ended Gaskells will remove the sculptures and ensure they are recycled.
The Great Green Sculpture Challenge is inspired by the forthcoming display of work from the Tate Collection, DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture, which opens to the public on 1 May 2009. As part of this display, the renowned Jacob Epstein sculpture Jacob and the Angel (1940-1) will take up position in the Tate Liverpool foyer from 16 March 2009.
The Great Green Sculpture Challenge supports Liverpool’s Year of the Environment 2009 - the year is the biggest green celebration ever seen in the North West and is aimed at making Merseyside truly green and sustainable.