‘Deliberately obscure’: how to locate the weird world of hidden public art

Towards the end of June, five monumental sculptures in shimmering white marble were loaded on to a boat and dropped to the seabed off the Tuscan coast of Italy. Carved over three months by five up-and-coming sculptors, they were the latest contribution to a modern Atlantis – a drowned city of statues accessible only to free-divers or those with serious scuba kit.

In the commoditised art world, it doesn’t make sense to hide work away, yet from prehistoric cave painters to the 13th-century stonesmiths who carved gargoyles high on the spires of medieval cathedrals, artists and craftspeople have always done it – and still do. Such work isn’t sellable or even necessarily classifiable as art, but it has an energy and an integrity that touch you if you’re lucky enough to find it.

“You can’t keep the human creative spirit down,” says the artist Emily Young, who lives in Tuscany and is among the artists who have contributed over the years to the Casa dei Pesci (“fish home”). “People won’t not do things and I think that’s heroic, really. Sometimes it’s just about leaving your mark. And then there are others, like me, who turn that energy to trying to solve a problem.”

Conceived by a local fisherman, Paolo Fanciulli, the Casa dei Pesci is both a work of great beauty and a practical solution to the ecological disaster of industrial-scale trawling, which had reduced the rich sea meadows to a desert of grey sludge. Its statues snag the huge trawling nets while stabilising the sea floor, giving the ecosystem a chance to grow back.

It’s an inspiring idea that has drawn in many local artists, as well as the elderly owner of the quarry that once provided the white carrara marble for Michelangelo’s statues. He donated 100 unsellable slabs of flawed marble, from which Young – one of the UK’s great stone carvers, whose work is currently on show at North Yorkshire’s Thirsk Hall sculpture garden – carved three monumental heads.

Young called one 12-tonne piece, now lying eight metres down, Weeping Guardian because, thanks to an imperfection in the stone, it has a big black tear running down its cheek. Since her three figures arrived back in 2015, seaweed and lobsters have returned to the area and dolphins are coming back to play, giving an extra resonance to the fact that, in the future, nobody will see the guardian’s tear, or even the guardian itself, because it will have become part of an unusually knobbly reef, furred up with life.

Young doesn’t have the diving skills to visit in person, but the changing environment has been captured on film. “It’s magical to see the fronds growing, and to wonder what an archeologist of the future might make of them. Over the generations they may prove to be quite powerful, or they may not survive at all. That’s the real unknown that faces us all, which I find very poignant,” she says.

The conversation between past, present and future that Young’s classical seabed statues embody is familiar to the urban architectural pioneer Dan Dubowitz, who conceived a hidden art project during the regeneration of Manchester’s rundown Ancoats district over a 10-year period starting in 2002. The Ancoats Peeps are a series of spyholes into scenarios Dubowitz found or constructed inside old buildings. They might reveal a steaming toilet, an abandoned workshop or a disorienting timepiece.

“I make these pieces of work as part of my practice but I never call it art. Because I’m not trying to sell anything, it comes about in a completely different way. They’re not about me, they’re about making a place,” says Dubowitz. “There was no definitive map, so no one ever knew how many were there, why they were there, or who built them. Being deliberately obscure, people have to put in the work to find them.”

The Peeps ran its course in 2012 and was memorialised in a book, though a few peepholes – even Dubowitz doesn’t know how many – remain, a decade on. Ancoats is now a highly desirable neighbourhood, so they have fulfilled their purpose, he says. “In the history of industrial Britain, Manchester was the city that rose hardest and fastest and fell hardest and fastest. Part of the cycle of city life is that it eats itself, so the Peeps were always intended to be ephemeral.”

Dubowitz has now taken the concept a stage further to help with the development of another area, Mayfield, a six-hectare wasteland of old railway property behind Piccadilly station that was brought back to life as a park last autumn. The “Grit Walks” involves a series of historical anecdotes printed on cards that have been given out to security guards and attendants to start furnishing the area with the humanising give and take of urban myth.

Some, like the one about the Sultan of Zanzibar’s visit in 1875 to a state-of-the-art calico printing works on the site, are historically true. Others are more whimsical. Dubowitz is fond of the story of a night watchman who takes comfort from a robin that seems to show up in one of the newly planted trees whenever he’s missing his dead mother.

The title Grit Walks is both literal and metaphorical, he says, reflecting a gritty area built up with gritty determination. Visitors are led along grit paths, through grit rooms created by storytelling. This is a construct so hidden that it only exists in fragments, in the heads of those who have been exposed to it. “It’s so important that people feel a sense of discovery themselves, because then they go away and tell other people,”says Dubowitz.

One of the hazards of hidden art is that it can all too easily be destroyed, as the Turner-nominated artist Michael Dean discovered when the local council removed a lamppost near London’s British Museum, the top of which he had wrapped in pages of a book two years earlier as an extension of a 2017 exhibition at a nearby gallery.

Rare projects, such as Jane Edden’s Post Secrets, achieve the perfect paradox of being both hidden and so repeatedly rediscovered that they become local landmarks. Back in 2009, Edden infiltrated 11 metal traffic bollards in Cardiff City centre with miniature dramas that could only be glimpsed through a pinhole in the bollard’s casing. Devised with local drama students, the scenes were made in monochrome perspex to counteract the “shoutiness” of the surrounding shopping area, says Edden. “I like the idea of an object having two purposes. A bollard has to exist, so make it exist in a better way. My starting point was that I wanted to create a piece of art for Cardiff that the people could own: you only knew about it if you lived there.”

Last year the bollards were rediscovered by BBC Wales. In March this year, one was stolen, one vandalised and another removed to make way for a manhole cover. A social media campaign was launched and they were returned to Edden’s workbench, where their tiny scenes were restored and resealed. Nine of them were put back on the streets at the end of June, and the damaged 10th one was repurposed as an information post.

The expected lifespan for public art is 25 years, says Edden, who brought to the bollards a handy training in industrial design. “After 14 years in Cardiff city centre they have had a hard life, she says. “Public art has to withstand a lot: rain, shine, rugby fans, flyposting. They all have scuff marks low down, I suspect from the street cleaning machine. But they have done really well.”

Twenty-five years is a blink of an eye to Steve Dilworth, a Hull-born sculptor who creates a witchy sort of art using found materials from the Scottish island of Harris, on which he has lived for 40 years. Bird corpses, animal bones, sea water and ancient rock all figure in his sculptures, which often hide one element away inside another. “I like that thing where materials and ideas fuse,” he says. “Some people call it 3D poetry when an idea becomes an object, because it is dark and the darkness is tangible.”

Many of Dilworth’s works are shipped out to be sold to collectors and museums, but others lead more secret lives on the island. He ground a large “navel” into the belly of a mountain range known as the cailleach (“the hag”) because its contour looks like the body of a sleeping woman. It was a feat that required enlisting the local coastguard to helicopter his stone-cutting equipment up to the site, all to make a work that will only ever be seen by the intrepid few who not only know it’s there but are fit enough for a two-hour mountain hike.

Dilworth is a mythmaker with a dedicated international following. Fans chipped in to fund a book about him, to be published this autumn, and one made a documentary about his work last year. One of his more accessible works is a small box made from whalebone, bound in nautical rope and containing a vial of water “from a calm sea”. It became the subject of a 2019 film, The Whalebone Box, by the documentary-maker Andrew Kötting and the writer Iain Sinclair. Originally created to be hidden away in a local church, the box travelled down to London to make an appearance in the BBC Late Show’s Alternative Turner prize in the early 1990s, then spent the following three decades sitting on Sinclair’s desk, awaiting its next adventure.

The Whalebone Box shows the writer taking it back to Harris, where it is ceremonially buried on a beach. That was Kötting and Sinclair’s myth, chuckles Dilworth, who quickly dug it up again. It now sits between two priceless Mercator globes in the law library at London’s Middle Temple, after Dilworth made friends with a QC who holidays on Harris. “I thought that’s where the box should be,” says the sculptor. “It’s in the spirit of the place. It’s not owned but taken care of.”

That is ultimately what makes the idea of hidden art, in all its forms, so refreshing: it is an antidote to our consumerist society – a powerful tonic distilled from the absence of ownership and the spirit of place.

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