Wish has been months in the planning and is part of the Belfast Festival which started on 17 October and lasts for ten days. This world class piece of land art is made up of 30,000 pegs. Add to this 2,000 tonnes of soil and an equal amount of sand and you begin to realize the titanic scale of this project. All told, it covers eleven acres of Belfast’s old docklands. Although the International Space Station is yet to take any pictures of Wish, this Face from Space is a thrilling sight for visitors to the city flying in and out of George Best Belfast City Airport.
Talking of Titanic, the piece sits in the shadow of the year old visitor center dedicated to the ship, her makers and passengers. Titanic Belfast and Wish are probably the most prominent, certainly the largest, symbols of the cultural and artistic renaissance the city is undergoing at the moment. Wish represents a new face for Belfast on the old face of the city not to mention the city’s optimism that its future is brighter than many thought possible.
Rodriguez-Gerada enlisted a number of community groups and local businesses to arrange the sand and soil which became the top layer of his photographic image of the six year old girl. This image was itself plotted on the ground using state of the art vector computer technology.
All pictures courtesy of the Titanic Belfast Flickr Photostream.
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