The 11-Acre Portrait You Just Can’t Miss

As part of the Belfast Festival, Northern Ireland’s capital city is currently playing host to WISH, a public art project by Cuban-American artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada.

Already nicknamed by local residents as 'The Face from Space', the portrait of an anonymous Belfast girl is so enormous at its 11-acres that it can only be viewed from an aeroplane (or from a mountaintop). It was first plotted on a grid using some very swish technology and 30,000 manually placed wooden stakes. After that volunteers spent a month helping to 'draw' the portrait using nearly 8 million pounds of soil, sand and rock. Now that's patience.

Rodríguez-Gerada is known for his giant-scaled portraits in public spaces. In a statement, he says of WISH, "Working at very large scales becomes a personal challenge but it also allows me to bring attention to important social issues; the size of the piece is intrinsic to the value of its message. Creativity is always applied in order to define an intervention made only with local materials, with no environmental impact, that works in harmony with the location."

Via Colossal.