A giant is born. The first steps—in public at least—have just been taken towards unveiling an ambitious new work of public art in Plymouth. At twenty-three feet and nine and a half tonnes, Joseph Hillier’s Messenger will be the largest lost-wax cast bronze sculpture in the UK. It has been mapped out using 3D scans of the body of an actor who performed at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, in front of which it will stand. Dubbed “the Messenger of the South”, it comes twenty years after the north east was given its own colossus, Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. Gormley’s is double the size of Hillier’s, but the latter uses one of the oldest metal-making techniques employed by the ancients to Donatello, each of the statue’s 2000 panels being cast individually from wax moulds which are then destroyed by the process.
