SHOPPERS who have been scratching their heads about a four-metre high wooden box which has been outside a Clitheroe art gallery since June are about to find out what's inside.

On Friday night Tom and Agula Swoboda, artists in residence at the Undergrand art studio, will take down the crate outside the York Street venue to reveal a two-metre high metal and wood sculpture in the form of a house.

The couple were asked to run the new Undergrand in May this year and were brought from their home city of Cieszyn, in southern Poland, where they owned their own gallery.

Agula, 29, said: "We've called it hou_se. We hope it represents the more spiritual aspects of a house, the longing we have for a place to rest and to dream.

"The idea came when we arrived from Poland.

"We were not in our motherland and had nowhere to live, so we really appreciated the concept of your own house.

"I was pregnant with my daughter Nadia, now five months old, and we desperately needed somewhere to live. When we found somewhere Tom started the sculpture."

The pair run four art workshops a week at the Undergrand covering a range of artistic levels in painting, drawing, sculpting and other creative forms.

Jane Silvester, tourism and arts officer at Ribble Valley Council, said the work should complement existing public art, such as sculpture in front of the Platform Gallery and the sculpture trail in Brungerley Park.

The Undergrand, so called because it lies beneath the Grand Cinema, has previously been used as a police station and was even prepared for use as a nuclear shelter in the 1980s. It opened in May this year.

A number of rooms provide space for painting, sculpture and drawing studios while others house a mini-gallery a chill-out room and a welding room. Owned by the John and Rosemary Lancaster Foundation, the building will stop showing films next month when the cinema moves to St Mary's Hall in Church Street.

Hou_se will be unveiled to the public at 6.45pm on Friday, October 22.