Sculpture in the City, 8th Edition

Richard Rome began his work on Pepper Rock in 1993 utilising, in part, elements from earlier dismantled sculptures. He recommenced work again in 1997 when the base unit was added, and the artwork was then rusted and varnished. The piece was shown at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park between 1998 and 2000.

In 2016 it was dismantled, blast cleaned and galvanised, re-assembled and waxed. From April 2017 until November it was exhibited at Cabot square, Canary Wharf. "Pepper Rock" is emblematic, human play.

Commisioners — Bonner Kunstverrein, Bonn, Germany

Poster-changers – generally used for revolving billboards – are incorporated into a seating structure resembling a waving ribbon. The two connected displays, each bearing six drawings, create a seemingly endless sequence of urban landscapes and objects in space. Much like a film edit, scenes are cut together, producing an abstract narrative, a meandering journey through a maze-like environment.

Gabriel Lester has redesigned the billboards for Sculpture in the City, creating a new sequence of sites and settings that respond to the artwork’s setting in Bury Court. This edit describes a journey from the formation of ideas in abstraction, to the physical streets of London city, with its hidden history and mysteries.

The sari is a traditional form of clothing: a single length of material, six metres of cloth, worn wrapped and draped around a woman’s body. This work consists of sari-like lengths, sewn together, hanging from a beam stretching the length of Heneage Lane and supported by its lamp posts.

The line of bright fabric is free to move in the air. A softness echoes aspects of women’s lives, of domesticity, of laundry put out to dry, and of subjugation or flirtation. From a distance the splashes of colour give the feeling of a long narrow painting. Sari Garden is commissioned by Sculpture in the City 2018.

Climb was made from the inside out. The sculpture is an obelisk made inside a tall wooden column filled with nearly three tons of wet clay. Starting at the base of this structure the artist physically dug her way upwards through the center of the material, leaving behind a vertical tunnel.

The surface of the clay inside was marked by imprints of her knees, feet, elbows, fingers and hands as she worked her way up.

Once the artist reached the top of this column of clay she cast the tunnel she’d made in a mixture of plaster and acrylic. The cast, which turned the negative space left by her actions into a shape, was then excavated out from underneath the remaining clay. Only then was the sculpture revealed for the first time, like a photograph developed from film.

Michail Pirgelis works exclusively with authentic aviation materials, which he selects from aircraft scrapyards in the American desert. UNIVRS is a cross-section of an airplane - specifically the passenger area of an Airbus 300. The width of the work reflects the exact measurements of one seating row in a plane, this is evident once the two window openings on both sides come into view.

By separating the material from its original context, and reducing it to minimal form, the sculpture becomes abstract and develops a new, unique aesthetic. The exposed skeletal structure evokes architecture as well as the space surrounding it.

Sarah Lucas’ sculpture Perceval - a life-size bronze horse and cart – presents a large-scale replica of a traditional china ornament, of the kind that took pride of place on many British mantelpieces forty years ago. Scaled up, the Clydesdale horse is powerful and majestic while offering an unthreatening sense of pastoralism and stolid reliability.

The proudly-fashioned cart houses two cast concrete marrows: off-scale symbols of phallic fertility. These giant vegetables are cast in cement, moving the knick-knack replica away from the realm of kitsch, and offsetting the smooth finish of the bronze with a rugged and contingent quality. Titled after a Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, Perceval reflects a fascination for Englishness evident in much of Lucas’s work, becoming an object for public display that is generous, democratic, familiar and accessible.

Intricate Polynesian fishing nets, whose lines and knots were also charts of wind and sea currents, are an inspiration for this textile installation. Alluding to the City of London’s maritime associations, Amanda Lwin’s handwoven net maps subterranean infrastructure beneath the City. The work’s title is drawn from Maya Jasanoff’s recent biography of novelist-sailor Joseph Conrad. ‘A Worldwide Web of Somewheres’ belongs to the artist’s ‘Capricious Cartography’ series: mapmaking that is more equivocal, contingent and unstable than traditional cartography.

Suspended above our heads, it recalls both an acrobat’s safety net, or a hunter’s trap; equally robust and fragile. The artwork, produced specifically for this site, affirms our continued dependence on physical connections to people, places and ideas beyond our immediate understanding. Commissioned by Sculpture in the City.

I’M STAYING is a neon sculpture which was originally commissioned in 2014. The sculpture travelled around the city of Bristol, UK moving quarterly for two and a half years, with each location determined by the Bristol public voting online and suggesting new locations.

The I’M STAYING project has since expanded and produced multiple artworks, including prints, screen-printed t-shirts, stamped currency, videos, photography, surveys and paintings. Each of these pieces attempts to explore the varying discourse generated from the neon and its movements. The artist will be developing new works while the sculpture resides in Leadenhall Market.

Please note this artwork has now been removed from St Helen's Square.

Opening the Air is a three-dimensional drawing made up of a geometric field of fluorescent Plexiglas discs or ‘coins’. The coins bear intricate etchings derived from plans of early eighteenth-century glasshouse design and are planted on a low workaday wooden table. As the City-scape becomes ever more glassy, Opening the Air reflects upon the original glasshouses whose currency was green growth.

Activated by light and the sun’s passage, the work changes in appearance throughout the day. Opening the Air is commissioned by Sculpture in the City.

As part of her series Diversifolia– which in the scientific names of plants indicates a single species possessed with a considerable variety of leaf – Crocodylius Philodendrus employs clusters of bouquet like arrangements comprised out of a variety of animal forms that explode into space in all directions.

Her calculated compositions employ a structural property called "tensegrity," wherein individual parts are arranged in balanced compression and secured with tensile cables, that galvanizes the aluminum crocodiles, hogs and deer, cast iron tortoises, and bronze zebras into purely formal, abstract components as they propel into space due to their aggregate momentum. Circumnavigating her towering assemblage reveals the transformation of found objects and industrial refuse into expertly orchestrated abstractions that are fluid and rhizomatic in nature.

Bridging Home, London, 2018 by Do Ho Suh is an ambitious co-commission installed on the footbridge over Wormwood Street - one of the busiest roads in the City of London, near Liverpool Street. Do Ho Suh’s architecturally scaled installations are informed by his personal experiences, that recreate specific domestic spaces that he has resided in, expanding on his ongoing investigations of memory, notions of home and migration, crosscultural displacement and integration. Bridging Home is a series that Suh has been conceptualising over the last decade.

The piece is a to-scale replica of his childhood home, a traditional Korean house, adorned with a bamboo garden, that appears to have fallen onto the bridge at an angle. Upon the invitation to respond to the migrant history of the East End and the City of London, Suh has conceptualised a physical realisation of the Bridging Home series, drawing parallels with his work and the impact of migration on individual stories, contrasting with the glass and steel architecture of the City of London.

The work was co-commissioned by Art Night and Sculpture in the City.

The work is curated by Fatoş Üstek and fabricated by The White Wall Company, with plants from Blooming Artificial. Further thanks to Lehmann Maupin, Victoria Miro, Savills, Velorose and Wedlake Bell.