A sculpture of Eleanor Rigby (of Beatles fame) will be unveiled at the Museum of Liverpool this week, the Liverpool Echo reports. The sculpture is made of £1 million worth of used bank notes.
Liverpool-born artist Leonard Brown made the sculpture. It took six months to be completed, using thousands of £5, £10 and £20 notes supplied by the Bank of England. After a long negotiation with the bank, he was given the old notes in the form of shredded pellets. He used £300,000 to fill the sculpture’s chest cavity. The remainder were mashed and molded to a steel frame.
The artwork stands at just over five feet tall and depicts a so-called “bag lady” with a scarf covering her head and a hat on top. She is wearing big glasses, a trench coat, and holds a carrier bag, bringing to mind the lonely lady of the famous Beatles song, which Paul McCartney wrote in 1966.
Brown said his inspiration was fueled by seeing an old lady carrying a large number of bags in Hull, where he now lives. “The sculpture serves to show people that money isn’t the only way to make you happy and we should all be thankful for what we have,” he explained.
A note accompanying the sculpture reads: “I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet,” a saying which Brown says he was often reminded of as a youngster growing up in Liverpool.