People behind Tyne and Wear’s biggest ever mass-participation, public art event

HEARING Jane Hogan, project leader for the Great North Snowdogs, relate the story of the so-called ‘Snowdog Stampede’, you can’t help but be impressed. The event, at the Biscuit Factory in June, brought sponsors face to face with the 1.5m artworks for the first time, with the corporate suits held back and then unleashed to plant a paw print sticker on their chosen canine before someone else got there first.

With a wry smile, Jane recalls that the gloves were off. “One man actually ripped his trousers in the rush to secure the design he wanted,” she says. “It was very competitive. But, amazingly, everybody seemed to get their first or, worse case, their second choice.”

The uninitiated may wonder what all the fuss is about. Over the weeks and months since Newcastle-based St Oswald’s Children’s Hospice teamed up with public arts company Wild in Art to organise Great North Snowdogs, there has been a steady stream of publicity to promote the trail. Artists have been unveiled – including the renowned graffiti scribe Temper, oil and pencil specialist Jeff Rowland and award-winning North-East painter Joanne Wishart – and celebrities including rock band Lindisfarne and actress Joanna Lumley have drafted designs.

What has remained unclear, however, is just what the appeal is – why would people bother following the entire Tyne and Wear Metro route to spot the 60 large dogs and 97 small dogs clustered mainly around it? The answer becomes clear at a special preview, in an empty unit hidden away on a North Tyneside industrial estate, where all the large dogs are amassed in one place for an invited audience, for one day only, until after the trail is dismantled on November 29.

Resembling The Snowdog in the story by Raymond Briggs, with smooth contours and chunky bodies – as if they’re actually made of snow – the models are fun and quirky; their designs executed with expertise. There are plain ones, like one in white fur and another in black velour, but most are multi-coloured with an obvious theme such as nature or local landmarks.

The brief was open, with artists encouraged to give their creativity free rein to come up with whatever design they liked, and some have gone for a strongly recognisable character – there’s an Elvis, Paddington and a pirate – while others have played more to the sponsors with, for example, a dog in a Barbour jacket and wellies.

Overall, the Snowdogs are a bold and eccentric bunch, with a cute factor that will no doubt prove an added incentive to go in hot pursuit of them. Jane feels that while the public may be unprepared for them, their arrival in the region will cause a stir. “It will be hard to avoid them – and also the social media, which has already started to go a bit bonkers,” she says. “There’s a fairly big level of expectation already.”

A veteran of this type of public art, Wild in Arts has delivered about 30 similar trails over the past ten years, including perhaps the best-known, Superlambananas (a cross between a lamb and a banana) as part of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture programme in 2008. Keen to work with a charity that was synonymous with the region, it chose St Oswald’s Children’s Hospice, and as the trail was to run pre-Christmas, it was decided that The Snowman and The Snowdog, the screen version of which premiered on Christmas Eve, 2012, should be the theme.

For Jane, it is especially appropriate given the charity’s work. “The end of the film is the little dog and the little boy mourning the fact that The Snowman has melted again, and so, for a hospice which tries to make really special moments for people but also has to deal with loss, it’s a very important symbol,” she says.

A key aspect of the project has been community involvement, and the trail’s small dogs have been designed mainly by schools from North Northumberland to Teesside. While the large dogs will be mostly outdoors, the small dogs will be placed in clusters at indoor venues like the Sage, Gateshead, and Newcastle’s Eldon Square. A map of the latter’s locations has been published in the free Primary Times magazine, distributed by schools; and a complete map, showing where to find all the Snowdogs, can be downloaded from the trail’s website.

Jane says it was important to make the sites accessible, hence the partnership with Metro provider Nexus. “From the very beginning, we had the Tyne and Wear Metro in mind as our ideal partners, because they covered all the areas and we wanted people to be able to use the Metro to access the dogs,” she says. “The trail is totally free and you can download the map and just go. There’s an app which costs 79p and kids and grown-ups can use that to capture special offers and trophies when they see a dog.”

Great North Snowdogs is running concurrently with a trail in Brighton on the same theme and in partnership with the southern coastal resort, as well as through events in the region, the hospice is hoping to raise significant funds. While the small dogs will remain in situ until January, on November 29, the large ones will be removed, being brought together for a farewell weekend at Newcastle’s Civic Centre on December 3 and 4 before finally being auctioned off at The Sage, Gateshead, on December 6. “They tend to start at around the £3,000 mark,” says Jane. “Individual statues have sold for as much as £50,000.”

So confident is she of the trail’s success that, although it has yet to get under way, Jane is already planning the next one – and that, she claims, will be even bigger and better than Great North Snowdogs. “In two or three years’ time, we’re probably going to do it all over again with a different sculpture,” she says. “Other cities are on their fourth or fifth trail and they keep getting bigger and bigger and the level of anticipation is great because people know what to expect.”

Great North Snowdogs runs from September 19-November 29. For a map of locations, visit www.greatnorthsnowdogs.co.uk