About the project

Anthony McCall will create Projected Column, a slender, sinuous, spinning column of cloud rising into the sky from the surface of the water in Birkenhead’s disused Morpeth dock in Merseyside, directly opposite the city of Liverpool. The project will be produced by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).

A sculptural landmark based on pure energy, Projected Column will echo the dynamism of a city and a region that has recently undergone major cultural and economic development.

Extending upwards as far as the eye can see, and visible on a clear day from up to 100 km away, the column will disappear and re-appear in slow structured sequences, punctuating the skyline whilst connecting it with the city and its docks.

Projected Column will recycle discarded local heat, and, day or night, will operate as a self-sustaining system.

About the artist

Working in a zone between sculpture, cinema and drawing, Anthony McCall is well-known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly emerged in three-dimensional space.

His work was represented in Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7); The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image, at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008); and The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies, at Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (2003 – 4).

Solo exhibitions of Anthony McCall’s work have taken place at Centre Pompidou/La Maison Rouge, Paris, 2004, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, 2004, the Serpentine Gallery, London (2007-8), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009), as well as with Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, and Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne. For further information see http://www.anthonymccall.com