A different kind of message in a bottle
The Bottle of Notes
For Middlesbrough's largest public sculpture the artists drew inspiration from Captain Cook's journals
The Bottle of Notes stands proudly in central Middlesbrough as if washed up on a beach. Sculptors Claes Oldenburg (Swedish) and Coosje van Bruggen (Dutch) created the steel structure to celebrate Middlesbrough's industrial and pioneering past whilst looking forward to a dynamic future.
The monument comprises two steel bottle shapes made up of words. The outer bottle, painted white, quotes from Captain Cook's journals:
"we had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the planet Venus over the Sun's disc"
The inner bottle, painted blue, includes a line from one of van Bruggen's own poems:
"I like to remember seagulls in full flight gliding over the ring of canals"
Submitted by: Sarah McLusky, 11 September 2003
