These Amazing Sculptures are Made By a County Durham Artist
County Durham-based environmental artist Steve Messam transforms national and international landscapes with his unusual outsized sculptures
Steve says he ‘fell into’ art, describing the beginning of his career as ‘a lucky accident’. He dropped out of art school and worked in a photographic lab in London. ‘I learned all the dark room skills and a lots of studio skills and was always passionate about photography,’ he says. Steve moved to Glasgow and worked as a freelance photographer for broadsheet press and music press including NME and Q magazine. It was when he moved to Cumbria that his career path changed. ‘There wasn’t a defining moment where I decided to be an artist,’ he says. ‘Things just started to move in that direction.’
Steve’s eye-catching and innovative artistic installations challenge the way we see our landscape. He finds his inspiration in geology, culture and history and is renowned for his bold use of colour, form and scale, which he describes as ‘bigger than a house’. Put simply, he says ‘I create large things in landscapes’.
‘It’s an absolute privilege to be doing this and this is all I ever do,’ Steve says, ‘I’m passionate about the opportunities for art in the rural landscape, and doing things that are beyond the watercolour painters, which for a long time was considered to be what came out of a rural area. I think there are a lot more possibilities of potential and it’s far more exciting, seeing art in a rural area, because there are no rules to break. So you really can do whatever, and it’s the place where you least expect any contemporary art to be so whatever you’re doing is being creative and breaking boundaries all the time – and I really like that. I like finding creative responses to the things that I want to say and the things that interest me about living in a rural area and about rural communities, and everything that makes up rural life and rural culture.’
Steve is equally passionate about architecture, which means he also enjoys challenging his creativity in urban landscapes. ‘I like being able to transform architecture and work on that scale as well,’ he adds. ‘It’s always about stories, so [in cities] it’s about the stories around architecture and architectural forms, and it’s not necessarily about great buildings. It’s just about interesting built structures.'
It would seem cruel to make Steve pick a favourite of his creations. ‘The ones that I’m most passionate about are the ones that I’m working on at the moment – and some of these I can’t tell you about,’ he laughs, but highlights PaperBridge as a major project in his career. He built this structure (a functional packhorse bridge over a river) in the Lake District in 2015 entirely from 22,000 sheets of bright red paper. Without relying on adhesives or supports, Steve showed the strength and versatility of simple materials.
‘Although I’d done an awful lot of work, working out if we could actually make a bridge out of paper, we did it with small models and it seemed to be working, but until you build it, you have absolutely no idea,’ Steve recalls. ‘Then you spend three days moving four and a half tons of paper around never knowing if it is actually going to stand up… and it did! That was an amazing experience, when I took the forms away underneath the arch of that and it stood up. At that point you go “oh yeah it works” but it’s a much deeper emotion than that,’ he laughs.
The most important thing for Steve though, is how visitors to the landscape react to his creations. ‘It was just incredible seeing this constant line of people traipsing up the valley to see it,’ he says. ‘You have to walk for two and a half miles from the nearest place that you can park your car so you’ve got to commit yourself to do that. You could tell all the people who weren’t used to it, because you could see all the different footwear! Some people had never stepped off a footpath in the Lake District ever, but they were walking up to see this because they wanted the opportunity to walk over a bridge made of paper because they’d never do that ever again. I guess that’s part of the experience – that’s once upon a time and never again. Particularly with the big pieces in landscapes, it is about the people. It’s about how they experience it – they touch it, have to walk over it or walk through it. Particularly with large pieces, that’s how you experience it – you don’t just experience it from a picture on Instagram, but by standing in front of something which is bigger than a house, then you have that emotional response. How that makes you feel really interests me.’
In 2019, Steve unveiled Hush, an installation that filled a lead-mining scar in the North Pennines with more than five kilometres of yellow fabric. It was constructed at Bales Hush, an old lead mining site on the Raby Estate in Upper Teesdale. Steve is also well-known for his inflatable installations which have transformed everything from historic ruins to modern urban spaces. His 2020 project, Belltower (which was on display at Ushaw Historic House and Gardens near Durham), featured an inflatable sculpture that accentuated the site’s Gothic Revival architecture. Most recently, Steve produced Whistle for the launch of the S&DR200 festival, All Change, featuring a dozen replica steam engine whistles echoing around the landscape.
Steve’s latest project is in celebration of Bradford UK City of Culture. Wild Uplands will see striking new art, as part of an open-air gallery, take over the moors above Haworth. Steve and three other internationally-renowned artists, Monira Al Qadiri, Meherunnisa Asad with Studio Lél and Vanessa da Silva, have created new artworks for this in response to Penistone Hill, and visitors to the area will be able to see the art on display from May until October.
‘I am creating an artwork which is a tower and it’s made from the fleece of the sheep that graze on the landscape there,’ explains Steve. ‘It’s in the form of the way that the stone sits under the ground (the stone that built Bradford) and it’s clad in the wool that built the industry of Bradford, so it’s this whole relationship between the upland landscapes and how they’re the landscapes that built the city. We worked with the local sheep farmers and I’ve been working on it for a year now! It’s a major undertaking because it’s 12 metres high. It’s huge! You’ll get to walk through it. It’s probably one of the biggest construction pieces.’
Despite each being different from the last, a structure has to start somewhere and Steve says that’s often with a blank sheet of paper. ‘When somebody comes to me for a commission, or if I want to start creating artwork, I never start with an idea,’ he explains. ‘It always starts with the place. I have no pre-conceived ideas about what I’m going to do at all. I think that’s the only way to do it otherwise you would just end up trotting out the same stuff. Or you’d find a disconnect with the place, and the place is really, really crucial. It’s about going to the place, spending time there, looking at it, visiting a lot, understanding it, talking to people, talking with people, and then coming up with an idea. Once you’ve got the idea, it’s a case of how you actually do it. That’s the challenge of being an artist – to keep it exciting and keep trying new things. I want to be as free creatively as I can, and try to do something that’s meaningful.’
