A £2m singing clock is to be installed at the site of a planned high-speed railway station in Birmingham, with the new public artwork considered the most ambitious commission in the city’s history.
The Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz was on Tuesday named winner of the Birmingham Big Art Project contest to place a major work at the centre of a city centre regeneration project.
Philipsz will create Station Clock, which will feature more than 1,000 voices that will be heard in differing combinations on the hour, every hour. She said she was “very proud and honoured” to have won the commission for what will be her biggest permanent work to date.
“I’m very happy, I can finally tell people now because I had been sworn to secrecy. I can’t wait to get started on it,” said Philipsz.
She was inspired by a circular diagram of the chromatic scale, which is pinned up in her Berlin studio. “I’m not a musician, I didn’t study music and often I work with deconstructing compositions so it is good to have the scale up on the wall for me to refer to,” she said.
Philipz’s Birmingham work will be a clock with the digits one to 12 replaced by the 12 tones of the musical scales, from A to G sharp. “At times it will sound harmonious, at other times not,” she said.
The voices will sound low overnight and be fuller sounding during the day, culminating in a loud chorus at noon.
Phlipsz anticipates she will need more than 1,000 voices, which will be supplied by the people of Birmingham. “The city has so much diversity so I like the idea of using lots of different types of voices ... I want a lot of different textures of voices, male and female, old and young,” she said.
“We haven’t really started yet so I’m only imagining what voices we might get.”
Glyn Pitchford, the chairman of the project, said Philipsz’ proposal was “an inspired and unique artwork which will very quickly become an iconic image for the city of Birmingham”.
Arts Council England last year contributed £80,000 to the £2m scheme with the remaining money to be raised from “corporate sponsors ... and key stakeholders who stand to benefit from the project”.
It comes as arts organisations in the city come to terms with deep funding cuts – as much as 70% in the case of the contemporary arts venue Mac Birmingham – proposed by Birmingham city council.
Philipsz won the Turner prize in 2010 for a work that involved her singing a 16th-century Scottish lament under bridges on the Clyde.
Her work has since featured in major galleries such as Tate Britain, where in 2015 her sound work War Damaged Musical Instruments filled the huge central Duveen gallery, part of a cultural programme marking the centenary of the first world war.
She has permanent sound works in Münster, Rotterdam and New York but nothing on the scale of the plan for Birmingham.
The losing projects included Roger Hiorns’s proposal to create a steam train in stone with its surface rendered to resemble human skin, which he said would be “a symbol of the shaping of our sexual and physical identities by technology”. It proved the most controversial proposal with some claiming it looked like a train crash.
The others were a work called Blueprint for Happiness by Heather and Ivan Morison; a sculpture by Keith Wilson that very slowly moved from one end of the site to the other, about 25 metres a year; and a giant gold bracelet proposed by Brian Griffiths, a nod to the city’s jewellery-making heritage.
