First there were the big squares of plywood, bordered with yellow and black tape. Then, yesterday afternoon, they arrived in their yellow helmets. Three foot long drill bits. The mysterious squares pulled up to reveal the concrete secrets below...

The squad of art-builders were preparing the way for the Big 4. Is it landing this weekend? A closely guarded secret. Even those in the know don't really know. Rumour has it Westminster Council don't want the work going on on the weekend - some major engineering going on on the premises with cranes and steel girders and 800 staff coming&going makes much more sense.

So will the Big 4 be there when we arrive on Monday? Watch this space and I'll watch that one for you...

Channel 4's Big 4 goes up outside the Horseferry Road building in London’s St James’s Park this month and my ‘Big Art Tour’ starts in earnest, introducing the Big Art Mob to people up and down the UK, via schools, colleges and arts centres.

There have been a couple of ad-hoc, impromptu demos too. By chance, I bumped into a bunch of graffiti artists in Yorkshire (who prefer to remain anonymous!). They were curious about my interest in what they were doing and wound up photographing themselves in action and posting to the site

Knowsley Community College in Merseyside now has a number of keen mobloggers after taking away Big Art Mob postcards I distributed after a talk at their college.

Opt-in-for-Art (http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/exh_gfx_en/ART46722.html) a young people’s art project, based at the busy Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh now has its own Big art Mob group and the Gallery’s Johnny Gailey will be running Moblog workshops in October, based on discussions we have had by e-mail and when I visited the gallery a couple of weeks ago.

Last week I visited Halifax and the Dean Clough Mills (http://www.deanclough.com/) business community and arts centre. I was given a whistle-stop tour, by Arts Director, Vic Allen. The tour still took a good hour – but it was a very good and very entertaining hour. This impressive, responsibly renovated 19th century carpet mill is huge – it’s more like a village than a business park and the arts that are such a feature of Dean Clough (galleries, artists’ studios, theatre and resident perfomance group, I.O.U.) give it a vibrancy and sense of community not normally seen in more conventional business parks. We are planning a two-day workshop at the mills in the coming weeks to encourage the people of Halifax to look again at public art in their area and post to the Big Art Mob.

The next day, my visit to my home county of Yorkshire took me to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (http://www.ysp.co.uk/) in the beautiful countryside setting of Bretton Hall, near Wakefield (great place for a day out!). The park’s events Co-ordinator, Anthony ‘Shep’ Shepherd and I are planning a series of Moblog-related events, based around sculptures (by Henry Moore, Andy Goldsworthy, Anthony Caro, Antony Gormley, James Turrell etc) on display in the spacious grounds set in 500 acres of rolling landscape.

Moving back south, and west of London (where I live), I visited the New Art Centre (http://www.sculpture.uk.com) this week at Roche Court, East Winterslow in Wiltshire to meet with the Education Co-ordinator, Lucy Salisbury. Another country park setting, but this time a private concern, open to the public to view sculpture by artists the centre represents and exhibits – from Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore to Anya Gallaccio and Gavin Turk – in the grounds and gallery. The New Art Centre has an active education programme with over 50 schools as members. I hope to get involved with schools in the area there later this year and early in 2008 to introduce the Big Art Mob to Wiltshire schoolkids.

Watch this space for reports on the workshops and more news.

Nick Pearson
Big Art Project website manager