Polaris: Dare to Dream was made for Liverpool ONE and stood in Chavasse Park through the winter of 2018. It takes its name from the North Star, and its form from the instruments used to follow it.
A compass rose in Chavasse Park
The plan is a compass rose surrounded by the points of a star — celestial navigation and “following the star” in the same figure, with the compass that always points north at the centre.
The reference is to Liverpool’s nautical heritage, which felt like the right register for a city whose relationship with the sea shaped everything else about it. Visitors were drawn to the central Compass of Light, then invited outward through the surrounding constellation of columns.
The pillars of a city’s culture
The columns are not decorative. Each represents one of the pillars of Liverpool’s culture — its people, music, art, trade, education and sport.
Read together, the piece is about reach: how far Liverpool’s culture has travelled, and the worldwide influences that came back the other way and are visible in the city today.
Lit around the clock for eight weeks
Polaris launched on 16 November 2018 and stayed lit 24 hours a day until 9 January 2019 — close to eight weeks of continuous operation in a public park through a British winter.
That is a different engineering problem from a festival weekend. The piece was built from 96 colour-changing cubes, each weighing 65kg. A structure that runs unattended in a public space has to survive weather, handling and constant use without a technician on site, and it has to look as considered at four in the afternoon as it does at midnight.
