‘Hidden’ sculpture brought to light in £2.8m project

 They are the works of public art that millions walk past every day, but rarely notice – thousands of monuments at risk from exposure to the elements and other damage.

The charity Art UK is launching a project supported by £2.8million of Lottery money to catalogue 16,000 works that occupy outdoor public spaces and 150,000 works housed in museums and collections to create the first national database of sculpture.

The archive will be free to access, offering photographs and 3D images of 1,000 years of public sculpture.

It “will shine a light on sculpture hidden in plain view” and follows a similar initiative last year to catalogue more than 200,000 oil paintings.

Katey Goodwin, of Art UK, said: “We chose sculpture because it often receives less attention than other art forms. So often we’re too busy to look at the things around us. There is a statue of the great 19th-century navigator Matthew Flinders – and his cat – at Euston station, but how many people notice it?”