Tony Phillips: 12 Decades at Bluecoat in Liverpool
Creative Tourist
Tony Phillips’ etching series 12 Decades continues a survey of modern history that has occupied him over the last 40 years. It complements a new installation, 20th Century Chapel, that he is working on for Liverpool’s ‘Bombed Out Church’, St. Luke’s, and a proposed pedestrian trail of public artworks between the two buildings.
The sequence of 12 etchings will go on display in 2021 at Bluecoat and narrates key events and man-made phenomena from 1900 to the present, from the pioneering inventions that heralded the modern age to the mass- production and consumerism that characterise life today. The focus is on the nature of technological progress evinced by Man’s age-old aspiration to fly, starting with an image of the first powered flight (1903), and proceeding through the decades into the modern era of supersonic jet fighters and drones.
