Photography gets underway in Essex for major Art UK sculpture project

30 Apr Photography gets underway in Essex for major Art UK sculpture project

Photography is getting underway in Southend in the largest ever sculpture project undertaken in the UK.

Over the next two years, Art UK is aiming to digitise around 170,000 sculptures, which are located inside galleries, museums and public buildings and outdoors in parks, streets and squares, the length and breadth of the UK. These will then be displayed on the free-to-access artuk.org website for enjoyment, learning and research – the first database of its kind in the world.

The very first photography session took place at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. The first work captured was a sculpture of the head of the legendary Italian heiress and patron of the arts Marchesa Luisa

The first photographic records will appear on the Art UK website in late 2018. Once online, Art UK’s Art Detective network of crowd-sourced expertise will help collections fill in missing information about the sculptures.

The Art UK Sculpture project was launched in June 2017 (and will run until May 2020). The first months of the project have been focused on recruiting and training a large team of Coordinators and Photographers who are working directly with 3,000 public collections across the UK – from the Shetland Islands to the Channel Islands, and from Fermanagh to Lowestoft – to record the sculpture in their care.

Go to www.artuk.org to find out more