Day One
Jasreen from Arden School in Solihull is joining MADE for a week to work on her Gold Arts Award. She is working with artist Rich White at The Public in West Bromwich, as part of 'The Public Inquiry' comission.  Jasreen has summarised the findings below:

Sparking controversial interest, The Public is loved by many and is loathed by some. With the help of Rich White, MADE is pursuing a way to make the landmark more appealing and embed the building further into the community. After taking the opinions of the people of West Bromwich through a survey, Rich will create a sculpture that had been inspired by the thoughts and opinions of the general public.

Although some in the press have labelled The Public negatively, the general consensus of visitors to The Public is that the place is ‘fabulous’ and ‘wonderfully innovative.’ It is clear that many people who visit The Public daily have no negative criticism at all: they simply plead for previous events and pieces to be brought back because they enjoyed and loved them greatly. However, the building’s architecture and design is controversial – and this is something Rich wanted to address as part of ‘The Public Inquiry’. We are collecting feedback from visitors about what makes The Public a good place to be, and we are using this to shape a sculpture in the main entrance of the building.

We will keep you updated on our progress…

Day Two 
After collecting and collating research, Rich contemplated possible designs for his sculpture. The surveys showed that the people of West Bromwich have come to love the Public and that it has grown on them, thus responding to this idea Rich has decided to build a sculpture that seems to have grown on it (the building). The sculpture consists of round shapes that are attached to the bottom of the bridge that weaves across the entire floor of the centre. Clustering by both entrances, the ball-like structures, forming the sculpture, are strapped onto beams in a seemingly random manner.

Once he had thought of a concept of what it was going to be like we started to experiment with the materials to see what they could do. To make a round shape with the limited resources, Rich tied the corners of a sheet a thick card with a cable grip and then pushed in the folds to round it off. Having made over 30 of these ‘balls’ we wait in anticipation to see what the final sculpture turns out like. 

Day Three
After spending yesterday creating the basic structure of the sculpture and fine-tuning the plan of how to go about creating and stabilising things, today we continued in the same manner until we had finished our resources.

The entrance to the Public had already changed at 9:30; the ‘happy fungus,’ as Rich called it, had already started to grow on to the structure of the building. Rich had strung the white clumps to the beams with unused welding wire. Quickly we realised that the resources we had we not sufficient, thus after procuring yet more paper we continued in a machine like manner, churning more white ball like structures. Throughout the day the emerging sculpture repeatedly surprised and intrigued people, we had many interesting conversations about what other people thought of the piece and the response was very positive. People understood the concept and story behind the sculpture and seemed to like it. Soon enough the structure was complete and was embedded into the building in a way that made it look like it really had ‘grown’ from the beams themselves.