The American artist Spencer Tunick known for mass nude-in photo shoots is to stage a mass gathering to celebrate Hull’s year as UK City of Culture.
The Internationally-renowned photographer will present a new work in the East Yorkshire port on 9 July, with the resulting work unveiled in 2017. Organisers hope hundreds of people will strip to become part of the work, entitled Sea Of Hull. Participants are to be covered in cosmetic body make-up, before assembling to form the multiple colours of the sea and create abstract shapes for the camera.
The New York-based artist has created more than 90 similar human installations worldwide, including at the Sydney Opera House, Place des Arts in Montreal, Mexico City and Munich in Germany. His work in the UK has used places including Gateshead and Folkestone as backdrops. Tunick hopes people will help create “a sea of humanity flooding the urban landscape”. “I’m very interested in the history of the city and its place as a seafaring centre and its relationship to a rich maritime past,” Tunick said of Hull.
“It intrigues me that in some places where there are major streets or parks today, previously there was water.”
He said he hoped he would create “a sea of humanity flooding the urban landscape” and the body paint would help many people to overcome their inhibitions to posing naked.
Kirsten Simister, of Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery, said: “It’s an opportunity to involve people directly in an amazing live performance that will temporarily transform the city.”
If you’re over 18 you will be eligible to take part in this naked extravaganza.
Spencer Tunick was born in the US in Orange County, New York in January 1, 1967. He is an is an American artist best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. These installations are often situated in urban locations throughout the world, although he has also done some “Beyond The City” woodland and beach installations and still does individuals and small groups occasionally. Tunick is the subject of three HBO documentaries, Naked States,[1] Naked World,[2] and Positively Naked.[3] His models are unpaid volunteers who receive a limited edition photo as compensation. In 1986, he visited London, where he took photographs of a nude at a bus stop and of scores of nudes in Alleyn’s School’s Lower School Hall in Dulwich, Southwark. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988. In 1992, Tunick began documenting live nudes in public locations in New York through video and photographs. His early works from this period focus more on a single nude individual or on small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he is now known. By 1994 Tunick had organized and photographed over 65 temporary site related installations in the United States and abroad. Since then, he has taken his celebration of the nude form internationally, and has taken photos in cities that include Byron Bay, Cork, Dublin, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Caracas, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City, Sydney and Amsterdam. In August 1997, Tunick also photographed a large group of nudes at The Great Went, a festival hosted by American rock band Phish in Maine.