The car park as art

Artist Alison Waters is inspired by Stockport multi-storey’s concrete screen

A shopping centre car park in Stockport is the subject an art exhibition.

Artist Alison Waters has used the Merseyway car park as the muse for her latest collection of ceramics, currently on display at Manchester’s Modernist Society gallery.

Waters’s hand-built stoneware ceramics are inspired by her hometown of Stockport, where modernist, industrial, and contemporary architectural styles stand side by side. The diverse shapes, colours, and materials of this urban landscape captivate her visually.

View Through a Hole, is inspired by the modernist car park screen designed by sculptor and public artist Alan Boyson.

Waters says View Through a Hole is a love letter to a town where Modernist and industrial architectural styles stand side-by-side.

“There's a real mix of architecture in the town and everyone loves the Victorian bits, but when it come to the modernist architecture they struggle,” she said.

She said the ceramics were inspired by the views of Stockport through the gaps in a pierced concrete screen at the car park created by Alan Boyson in the 1960s.

Waters has partnered with her nephew, the photographer Dylan Barker, to celebrate Boyson’s car park screen, its modernist shapes and the views beyond. Barker is currently studying photography and 3D design, the two subjects aligning in this exhibition. A View Through a Hole

“I was exploring Stockport’s shopping centre and car park area with my nephew while he was taking photos for a school project on modernist architecture,” she said.

“I became fascinated by the slice of urban landscape visible through the holes in the car park screen. It was like looking onto a miniature landscape – a snapshot of the town’s architectural heritage, with Victorian, brutalist, and contemporary buildings all contained within a modernist shape.”