I'm a man who appreciates art. Whether it's the Annual Press Photography Awards or the new Anthony Gormley installation on the South Bank, but last month a new piece of 'art' opened in Liverpool that has car loads of skaters coming from as far as Brighton each day.

The fresh new gallery, A Foundation, has recruited the services of an American architectural designer to build an installation that can be skated. The American company, called Simparch, are old hands at building weird and wonderful constructions and they lived up to reputation building a perfect 35ft fullpipe and a kidney shaped bowl thats suspended 10ft in the air. The whole thing is open to skaters and BMX free of charge during exhibition hours, the idea being that the riders become part of the art themselves. How this is a piece of art and not just a pristine indoor skatepark I can't quite grasp, but I'm not going to complain about having the set up 5 minutes drive from my house! The bowl is suspended in the air so that people can walk underneath the structure and hear the skaters riding the bowl above, it's quite an eerie experience so in that respect it works well. We talked to a few of the locals that have been ripping the place up since it opened last month...and here on this page you can read, see, and love it, but you can't skate it - the only way to do that is to make your way to Liverpool yourself...

You're pretty lucky to have this set-up, what's it like to ride?
It's really, really smooth. The full pipe is amazing, probably worthy of its status as a work of art (from a skaters point of view). The bowl is old skool, very gnarly and very tight. Dropping in is strange, taking you back to the 70's. Gotta respect the guys who started it all back in the day.

What's your view on it being an Art installation?
Most definitely a work of art. It gets people involved in art even if they don't normally go to museums, like me. You also get a lot of people coming who would never normally see skateboarding. I think it gives people a brief glimpse into the window of skateboarding, and the noises under the bowl give you an idea of the rawness. Wheels on wood - a nice noise.
Just the sight and the sheer size of giagantic 30ft high man made wooden full pipe makes me smile. And thats what art should do :-)

Drum and Basin reopens on 6th February 2008 and is free to all...

A Foundation
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool
L1 0BY



www.simparch.org


Words and Photos by Billy Tomlinson.