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Tunstall Shard sculpture at Tunstall A marvel of an idea in stainless steel 
Location: Jasper Square, Scotia Road, Tunstall Installed: Arrived for installation 12th January 2009 Unveiled: 19th January 2009 Commissioned by: Dransfield Properties, Barnsley Sculptor: Robert Erskine Dimensions: 35ft high x 27ft wide Weight: 7.5 tonnes Material used: Stainless steel 316 series Frozen in time, a finger print on an ancient Roman ceramic shard is evidence of the human link, before our time, of intent and skill. 'Tunstall Shard', by Sculptor Robert Erskine FRBS, acknowledges the generations of people in Tunstall, whose occupations and skill created Tunstall's fine reputation for outstanding quality, so characteristic of its industries. The sculpture is based on a shard of pottery from Roman times, that was found in an underground oven when the Wedgwood site was being redeveloped. And it shows the fingerprint that can be seen on the original shard and which is thought might date back hundreds of years. The Jasper Square retail park is on the site of the former Wedgwood Alexandra pottery works which was built in 1886. The works were closed in October 2003. Situated at Jasper Square retail park, Scotia Road, Tunstall and Commissioned by Dransfield Properties for Phase 4 of their retail development in Tunstall, the sculpture is 300 times larger than the shard it is based upon. Fabricated in Stainless Steel at the works of Midas Technologies, Peterborough, it stands 35 ft high by 27ft wide, and weighs 7.5 tonnes. Tunstall Shard is created in wrought Stainless Steel, with a unique applied surface, which mimics the shading and tone of the original drawings and sketches for the sculpture. Additionally the surface will absorb as well as reflect the ambient light, especially on a clear sunny day. The front elevation faces Scotia Road which is due west, so at sunset dramatic lighting effects will result. Given below is the first hand account given by the designer Mr Robert Erskine starting from the conception, designing, fabrication and erection of this marvel. In 2002, I was approached by Dransfield Properties Ltd, of Barnsley, UK, experts in urban regeneration, to design a unique sculpture, to anchor the centre of their new re-development of Tunstall, one of the 5 towns which makes up Stoke on Trent, England. The site for the sculpture is the former Alexandra Wedgwood Pottery. Historically the area is the UK's centre for ceramics production. The world renowned pottery manufacturer Sir Josiah Wedgwood established his manufacturing base there. He was an artist, and ceaseless innovator leading the world in terms of experimenting with glazes, and developing new methods of firing. His company put Tunstall and Stoke on the map. I was excited by the challenge of discovering a starting point for a design good enough to turn into a sculpture. The reason was simple, Stoke has numerous public sculptures all relating and in many cases repeating the iconography of the area. The bottle kiln is synonymous with the landscape, and indeed the name Stoke derives from the many bottle kilns which belched out thick smoke, having been 'stoked' to produce the correct temperatures for the ceramic products to be fired in Stoke's heyday. These 'kiln sculptures' proliferate the town. For me they are too obvious a form, perhaps an easy get out for creating a sculpture. I wanted to dig deeper move things forwards. I felt uneasy about just placing a sculpture from my own personal preoccupations, purely as expression, onto the site. I needed to find a focus. As with any project research is of the essence, it provides ideas, starting points to react against or indeed be stimulated by. I decided to find the earliest evidence of who came to Tunstall and left behind signs of ceramic manufacture. I wanted to know who started the whole thing off in Stoke, and why. The answer was the Romans who arrived in AD43. Uniquely they established not only the first ceramics production facility in Tunstall, but also the first iron manufacturing line as well. It was all due to clay and coal deposits easily accessible on the surface of the area. Indeed the English term for holes in road surfaces, 'pot holes', derives from the fact that later potters dug up blue clay from the roads around Tunstall and Stoke. That these two Roman technologies ran in parallel, to me were exciting. Having studied ceramics and metal working at art school I felt an immediate empathy with Tunstall. It also clicked in my mind that the sculpture for Tunstall must be made in fabricated stainless steel, echoing metal production. The idea, the starting point for the sculpture came after the chance discovery I made on site, of a Roman ceramic shard which by luck had a beautifully preserved finger print. The notion that I was the first to find this and make contact with the evidence of a human being from before my time was great. That finger prints are often left on ancient ceramic shards to me meant evidence of human endeavor, intent, and intelligence. We can only learn to go forwards, by drawing on and understanding what has come before. With the Roman shard discovered on site in Tunstall, I began a series of many drawings and studies of it, which eventually developed into the stage of making a scale sculpture, a maquette, French for small 3D scale study. This study was created in wrought bronze, my preferred metal. I wanted the form to be as alive as possible from every angle, and view point. Each edge and there are 6, have a totally different thickness, and radii to the next. The whole form has a sweeping curve with optical illusions creating sexy twists, the front elevation is concave, the back convex. I deliberately set the shard on a point at its base, at an angle 5 degrees from the vertical. This is a subtle unsettling angle, which again contributes to the movement of the forms. The finger prints I felt must be an important element of the design. The reason, they relate to the making of pottery, the fingerprint is recognized as evidence of human life, contact. The problem was the correct way to incorporate them into the design. I did not want them etched into the surface or indeed cut into the elevations, it felt wrong. I felt they needed to be as 3D as possible, and, based on a real living persons fingerprint. The problem was resolved, the two sets of fingerprints are laser cut from modules and are in effect screens set 50 mm away from the front and back elevations of the Shard. This provided for shadows and a sense of 'floating depth' enhancing the effect. The Shard was fabricated from 304 HR Stainless Steel using for the outer skin sections 3.5mm gauge, and the internal central framework up to 35mm. The base plate section was 50mm gauge. The scale model I created allowed me to analyze precisely problem areas, especially welded seams, and the numerous radii, which would become magnified at fabrication. With so many sweeping radii and varying widths, starting points, and converging angles, the form although complex here and there was as we say in sculptors language 'do-able'. We come now to the problems facing sculptors of scale. Many sculptors like to get off on really obscene scale. In the UK there has been a trend for this, out do the last big sculpture and the critics will think you are simply wonderful. Big, large, extreme, it all adds up to presence, brutish existence, masculinity, domination. This is all very well, but get your small model wrong in the slightest way, and the most miniscule weakness is just amplified like one instrument out of tune in an entire orchestra. Knowing the 'rightness of scale' comes from experience, and also a developed sense of intuition. Some of the greatest sculptures will fit into the palm of your hand. The reason, because the forms invested, generate an energy from within the sculpture. When this is understood then when scaling the sculpture up, that energy remains. With Tunstall Shard the scale had to relate to the space, the adjacent architecture, and most importantly, to me, the sense of human scale. The Shard was scaled up by a factor of 10.5 from the model. Using 3D CAD, I found that some of the translations from my model were predictably being compromised, and as such 'tweaked' the data to match precisely. The same process was used with the finger print. Using a real finger print whose owner will forever remain a mystery, the print was scanned and manually adjusted until it was spot on. All the data was emailed to the laser cutting facility, on the other side of town, and the prefabricated sections numbered in sequence their codes etched onto each right hand corner. It was exciting to follow the laser cutting side of the project, especially seeing on the control screen the plan and plotting of each section. It still fascinates me as to how the system works, the ease and precision of cutting metal. How I wonder at what the earliest metal workers would make of this technology. Long gone are the days of using a jigsaw, or even a hand held plasma cutter.  Such is the reliability of the laser cutting process, that on fabrication, a tolerance of less than 0.5mm on any given length was found. When you are talking about a sculpture like this, 35ft height, by 28 ft width this is truly exceptional. After all the sections were cut, each one was carefully rolled to obtain exact radii. This was achieved by preparing the guide jigs, plates cut to the exact radius of each section. The fabrication was undertaken using a mix of MIG and TIG. To limit warpage and shrinking along the horizontal and vertical weld seams, support plates were tacked onto the reverse of and along all the seams at precise intervals. I did not want the sculpture to be viewed as a piece of fragile jewelry, and deliberately dressed the weld seams such that they are visible, but lightly blended. I also wanted a worked surface over the entire sculpture, and using a 290mm diameter angle grinder, applied a special surface effect. This took nearly three weeks of hard work and persistence, the result an increase in my biceps by almost 1inch, and a surface which comes alive as the light changes. The surface is related to the shading and tone that I use in my drawings, to express depth, light, and therefore a 3D effect, and you could say it is rather like milling steel blanks. It was important that the surfacing was not arbitrary, but carefully considered. Of course this was daunting at the outset, but I have done this before on other monumental scale stainless steel sculptures. The engineers who assisted me were of course thinking I was as mad as March hare, when I first started to attack the surface. I remember the first day I started this looking up the front of the Shard and thinking this will take forever, but the challengealways pushes you forwards.
Working on the Shard for almost  5 months like any large scale fabricated and engineered structure, one becomes attached to it. The team at Midas Technologies Ltd, who assisted me thus became attached, referring to the Shard as their 'baby'. The team was delighted when the two halves of the Shard came together, outside, as the height of the Shard exceeded the safe roof height of their works. The one area that caused grief was the top left hand edge where its sweeping curved form meets the lower plane, exactly as I had found on my scale maquette. Using two cranes the sections were assembled on a freezing cold morning, the temperature -4 below freezing and, a strong wind blowing. The final assembly over, the finger print elements were attached and as the last part on the rear face was welded, I walked back across the yard without looking back. Turning I saw for the first time the completed sculpture, it looked confident, it had it 'rightness' about it. The air around it had not eaten into it.  The logistics of moving the Shard by road to Stoke on Trent entailed almost D Day planning. It needed a 40 foot long trailer, a pilot lead vehicle, and a full 4 Police vehicle escort, through three counties, and, I knew it would be enormous fun. The traffic hold ups were truly wonderful and as we neared the end of the journey, I had the following thought, 'From broken vessels come many shards, from little shards come ideas'. That the area of Stoke on Trent has within its ground millions of ceramic shards, who would ever have thought that one could be the idea for a sculpture, placed on the site of the former world famous Wedgwood pottery.
The Shard has been received well by the residents of Tunstall, and as it stands with its dramatic backdrop of late 19th century houses on a rising and undulating landscape, it can be well viewed. Dynamically illuminated at night every surface mark reflects light outwards, almost as though the Shard is being fired within a kiln. To me this is the energy started by the Romans, of the generations and communities of Tunstall whose skills created the reputation of its fine products. 
Biography  Mr Robert Erskine was born in London. From an early age he displayed an enquiring disposition towards all things mechanical. At 4 years of age he successfully locked, without keys, the family's late 50's Kelvinator fridge and aged 6 he started dismantling the family car, after which it was decided that his fathers' tool chest must be kept firmly locked. He then progressed to using the family cutlery as stone carving tools and a personal turning point took place in 1967, aged 13, he was taken to St Paul de Vence, Provence, to visit the Maeght Art Foundation. The exhibition was of paintings by Marc Chagall and a memorial exhibition of sculpture by Giacometti, who had recently died. Enquiring as to the meaning of a huge banner across the road to the museum proclaiming the word ‘SCULPTURE', he was told to go inside to see. The exhibition confirmed that what he wanted to do was 'make sculptur
At high school he had his first exhibition, which consisted of 8 large abstract carved blocks of plaster. After completing high school he studied sculpture at Kingston School of Art and Design, Kingston Polytechnic, gaining a BA(Hons) degree in fine art sculpture, and completed post-graduate studies in sculpture, gaining an MA in fine art sculpture, under Professor Reg Butler at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London Trained in stone carving, ceramics, drawing, etching, photography, metal working, and welding, Robert Erskine often works in wrought and welded bronze, stainless steel, and copper alloys. Drawing is central to the development of his ideas. Among the many areas of focus is his fascination with the endless energy and rhythm of passing crowd forms, which make up the cityscape. He continues to expand and develop ideas. Awards In 1999 he represented Great Britain at the European City of Culture Sculpture Symposium, ‘A Sea of Steel', hosted by Holland. Of the 12 participating countries, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands awarded Erskine's steel sculpture, ‘White Rhythm', weighing in at 13.5 tons, first prize. The sculpture is sited permanently in the sculpture park of Week aan Zee. The Hakone Open Air Museum of Sculpture, Japan, awarded his sculpture ‘Sky Thought' the maquette of excellence, at the International Sculpture Biennale, 1992. For his sculpture ‘Quintisection', a massive stainless steel piece sited in Durham, he was awarded by the Royal British Society of Sculptors the 1994 international Sir Otto Beit Award for the most outstanding new public sculpture worldwide and in 1996 his landmark sculpture ‘Roll Down' sited at Bilston, West Midlands, was nominated for the Anderson Sculpture Prize. Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors 1993, Fellowship 1996. The Courtauld Institute and the Public Monuments and Sculptures Association have awarded Erskine's public and landmark sculptures the status of permanent public monuments in acknowledgement of his contribution to the heritage and culture of the nation. His work is held in many private and public collections around the world. Robert Erskine 34 Hamilton Road Harrow Middlesex HA1 1SX, UK Fellow Royal British Society of Sculptors http://www.roberterskine.com Tel: 020 8427 2243
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