The production of a bronze sculpture of Christ Church Cathedral Dublin in the medieval period

Tender description

Christ Church Cathedral is Dublin’s oldest working structure, a place of Christian worship and one of the city’s leading heritage attractions, welcoming 275,000 paying visitors per annum (2018). We wish to enhance the experience of self-guided visitors to our grounds and building by providing a tactile bronze 3-D sculpture depicting the cathedral in the 1340s, when the grounds housed the cathedral monastery. The assistance of our Research Advisor will be made available to the successful tenderer. The purpose of the model is to communicate the complex history of the grounds and the many changes that have taken place to the cathedral buildings in an appealing visual manner. Many of our visitors do not speak English as a first language so non-verbal communication is preferable. In line with our new accessibility initiatives, we also wish to make the sculpture tactile for our partially sighted and blind visitors. The sculpture should be easy to read by both sight and touch while also functioning as an aesthetically-pleasing work of art. The work will be installed in the grounds of the cathedral and is intended to be in place for many years. To this end we are looking for high quality craftsmanship and materials which will endure. This new addition to our interpretative scheme should sit well with the work undertaken by previous generations of craftsmen at the cathedral.