Garry Barker Working sketchbook

A sketchbook that was mainly used by the artist Garry Barker in order to work through a range of sculptural ideas related to the development of a public art work that would eventually be sited in the Patching Sculpture Gardens in Nottingham. The work was designed as an awareness raising memorial to the migrants and refugees who had died crossing the Mediterranean Sea and Barker was working through possible ideas that had emerged from conversations with people who had had experience of these events. In particular, one migrant had had hallucinations and visions of a swimming rabbit that flowed in and out of the waves and sea swell as he was drifting in a small boat in the middle of the sea. The final memorial tribute would be made of ceramic flowers, raised upon metal stems, the flowers being designed in such a way that they had bells inside them that chimed when the wind blew.