1479 Plates is a nine metre by five metre public artwork by Chris Tipping, commissioned by Bath and North East Somerset Council to commemorate the Combe Down Stone Mines Stabilisation Project.1 It takes the form of a map printed on 788 bone china dinner plates, exploring the relationship between present-day engineering and mining technology, stone mines heritage, natural history, and two eighteenth-century entrepreneurs, Ralph Allen and Josiah Wedgwood. The work was created in collaboration with Autonomatic (the 3D Digital Research Cluster at University College Falmouth), Oxford Archaeology, Hydrock, Scott Wilson, and the Combe Down project team, and was manufactured by Digital Ceramic Systems in Stoke-on-Trent.2 Each of 691 households affected by the stabilisation works were gifted a ceramic plate, one small part of the map, representing not only the individual household but the mining underworld beneath it.
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