01. Alice Channer

Burial, 2016
Sand-Cast Corten Steel
80 x 107 x 237 cm (each rock)

The rough dimensions of the two stretched rocks that make up Burial are approximately the length of an average-ish elongated, horizontal human body. The hollow forms of the rocks, positioned as if in a mourning procession, are similar in form to upturned sarcophagae. The sculpture imagines these sarcophagae as exoskeletons, hollow hard shells made to hold soft bodies whilst they are changing state. The rocks were cast from lumps of concrete the artist collected from London demolition sites as evidence of the changing materiality of the city. Made from Corten steel, their forms appear strangely organic, despite having been produced by the technological and industrial processes of scanning, stretching, milling and casting.

This is a MSCTY soundscape location. See below for more information.

Location: St Botolph without Bishopsgate Churchyard, London EC2M 3TL

02. Ruth Ewan

Silent Agitator, 2019
Aluminium, acrylic, paint
234 x 167.5 x 52cm

Silent Agitator is a large clock based upon a detail of an illustration produced by Ralph Chaplin in 1917 for the Industrial Workers of the World union (the IWW). Chaplin’s illustration, bearing the inscription ‘What time is it? Time to organize!’, was reproduced on millions of gummed stickers, known as ‘silent agitators’, that were distributed by union members in workplaces and public spaces across the US. The clock hands bear workers’ clogs or, in French, sabots from which the word sabotage is derived (sabotage was originally used in English to specifically mean disruption instigated by workers). Clocks are a ubiquitous symbol within industrial disputes as hourly wages and the extent of working hours are often the source of argument. Silent Agitator nods to the IWW’s organising for the rights to a five-day work week and eight-hour work day, and posits a future in which we further reclaim our time.

This is a MSCTY soundscape location. See below for more information.

Location: Corner of Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street, London EC2M 3XD

03. Isabella Martin

Keeping Time, 2019
Scaffolding fabric
Dimensions vary

How do we experience time passing? How do we keep track? Keeping Time describes a perception of time as inseparable from our environment, with moving water as a unit of measure. Two banners display a text adapted from Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Shells and Time’. The phrase is spoken by a shell lying on the seafloor millennia ago, as it witnesses the world taking shape around it and the invention of a human-centred notion of history. Through these experiences it voices the fragility of time and the inevitability of its passing, regardless of whether or not we keep track, as days and nights crash over us like waves.

Location: Top of Bishopsgate (podium level), London EC2M 3XD

04. Mike Ballard

Rough Neck Business, 2019
Found wooden hoardings
331 x 243 x 290 cm

Rough Neck Business is made up of hoardings sourced from several sites across London. They include green hoardings from the Olympic Park, and blue hoardings from Dalston and Hackney Wick. All of these sites have seen great changes over recent years, and have been surrounded by hoardings for quite some time.

As with all of the artist’s sculptures, Mike Ballard is interested in taking this material, that normally represents a threshold of ownership and protection of property, and transforming it from sheet form into a 3d structure of its own, to be admired for its un-painterly qualities and the ‘witness marks’ of the time it stood on the street.

Location: 100 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 1GT

05. Oliver Bragg

In Loving Memory, 2020
Seven etched brass plaques
100 x 50 cm

This project focuses on the everyman, the natural environment and memories to place and memory itself. A series of engraved brass bench plaques have been installed to existing benches around the City of London. The plaques have been created to mimic the plaques that often adorn benches to memorialise or pay homage to a specific person. These, however, are fabricated: in loving memory of a ‘made up’ person or place or abstract idea.

Some of them are optimistic for a better future others long for a forgotten past. Some are more fantastical, abstract and others are more direct and perturbing or prescient. Many rely on humour as a way of communicating the idea.

Locations

Following inclusion in the 10th Edition of Sculpture in the City (2019–2021), the artwork was aquired and remains on permanent display in the City of London at seven locations:

06a. Undershaft, EC3A 8AH (next to St Helen’s Church) 06b. Fen Court Garden, EC3M 5DL
06c. Plaza outside Fenchurch Street Station, EC3M 4AJ
06d. Aldgate Square, EC3N 1AF
06e. Mitre Square, EC3A 5DH
06f. Bury Court, EC3A 8EX
06g. Jubilee Gardens, EC2M 4WD

06. Mark Handforth

Harlequin Four, 2019
Pinted aluminium, waterproof fourescent lights
426 x 70 x260 cm

Mark Handforth’s sculptures are meticulously crafted, but deliberately imperfect, often containing a wry humour and poetry in their references and arrangement in space. Harlequin Four is a large, fourteen-foot, freestanding sculpture, towering over the viewer and delineating in muscular calligraphy, an ad-hoc number four. Its harlequin colours and staggered light fixtures act like a beacon in the urban landscape. The form of the ‘4’ is recurrent in Handforth’s work, and he describes it as being ‘the beginning of every drawing’, as well as an incomplete star.

There is much symbolism in this number, for example it is considered a number of “being”, the number that connects mind-body-spirit with the physical world of structure and organisation. Likewise, the use of lights is a commonality throughout his practice, in the form of candles, reflective neons and fluorescent lights. Handforth cites the way that the landscapes of artificial light that many of us live in, “means that night just becomes a different kind of day”.

Location: Undershaft (next to St Helen's Church), London EC3A 8AH

07. Eva Rothschild

Cosmos, 2018
Spray-painted aluminium
350 x 370 x 340 cm

Cosmos (2018) is composed of three 3.5 metre-high slatted structures, which lean in to and support each other, painted black on the exterior and sprayed in a coloured gradient within. An imposing physical structure, the work encourages both a physical and aesthetic response. Says Rothschild: “The external piece is quite forbidding. Its black shiny surface is like a set of disruptive gates.”

Frequently Rothschild’s works demand the viewer to navigate their own presence in proximity to the work and the architecture of the surroundings. This work serves as a spatial interruption or threshold, reorienting the passage and behaviour of the viewer. As a mise-en-scene or backdrop for performance, Rothschild’s installations also invite the idea of the chance encounter, as spaces in which to reflect, watch, dream and act.

Location: Undershaft (between Aviva and The Leadenhall Buidling), London EC3P 3DQ

08. Laura Arminda Kingsley

Murmurs of the Deep, 2021
Vinyl
Dimensions vary

Through her project, Murmurs of the Deep, Laura Arminda Kingsley creates a pictorial world in which our communion with the cosmos and nature is unmediated by cultural valuations or static ideas of identity. To accomplish this, Kingsley looks at the world through the lens of deep time, giving equal importance to; the microscopic and the macroscopic; folklore and science; and the archaic and the new, to offer the viewer a non-hierarchical perspective in which to reconsider their place in the world. Installed on the escalators of The Leadenhall Building, Murmurs of the Deep invites viewers to immerse themselves in its freer, wilder world.

To accompany the artwork on display, the artist has created the Murmurs of the Deep Sound Installation, which consists of a recording of a poem, written in response to the piece playing in a continuous loop. In sharing this poem, inspired by the deep time history of our oceans and waterways; the artist hopes to offer the audience an alternative perspective with which to reconsider their place in the world. The sound installation is available to listen on Sculpture in the City’s multimedia guide on the Bloomberg Connects app (see below).  

Location: Leadenhall Building, London EC3V 4AB

09. Tatiana Wolska

Untitled, 2021
Cut and thermo-welded plastic bottles
Dimensions vary

Tatiana Wolska creates her sculptures using recycled plastic bottles. By cutting, perforating and thermo-welding them, she achieves sprawling, modular biomorphic forms. The transparency of the plastic adds visual effects of light and shadow. First shown at Palais de Tokyo in 2015, the sculpture occupied space in a monumental installation.

Seductive in their vivid red colour and intriguing in their forms, the sculptures appear aerial or dense and voluminous. By being light-weight however, these arresting forms can be placed within the environment in ways defying the laws of gravity. They can evoke floating islands of plastic waste or hold a strong poetic charge, appearing to be mysteriously suspended from the buildings or trees as if infecting the environment.

Location: 70 Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 0XL

10. Tatiana Wolska

Untitled, 2021
Cut and thermo-welded plastic bottles
Dimensions vary

Tatiana Wolska creates her sculptures using recycled plastic bottles. By cutting, perforating and thermo-welding them, she achieves sprawling, modular biomorphic forms. The transparency of the plastic adds visual effects of light and shadow. First shown at Palais de Tokyo in 2015, the sculpture occupied space in a monumental installation.

Seductive in their vivid red colour and intriguing in their forms, the sculptures appear aerial or dense and voluminous. By being light-weight however, these arresting forms can be placed within the environment in ways defying the laws of gravity. They can evoke floating islands of plastic waste or hold a strong poetic charge, appearing to be mysteriously suspended from the buildings or trees as if infecting the environment.

Location: Leadenhall Market, London EC3V 1LT

11. Guillaume Vandame

Symbols, 2019–2021
Flags
Dimensions vary

Symbols (2019-2021) is a sculptural installation consisting of 30 unique flags from the LGBTQ+ community. Spanning the original Pride Flag designed by Gilbert Baker in San Francisco in 1978 to its newest iteration by Daniel Quasar in 2018, the flags represent the diversity of gender, sexuality, and desire. The flags are standardised and ordinary, each five feet by three feet, and hang equidistant to represent the equal value and potential each community group has in the world today.

Following the recent death of Baker in 2017 and President Trump’s banning of the Pride Flag at U.S. embassies internationally, alongside the global absence of Pride during the pandemic and increased hostility and violence towards the LGBTQ+ community, symbolscelebrates the joy and freedom to love who you love while acknowledging the struggles these community groups have endured to gain visibility, human rights, and equality.

Location: Beehive Passage, Leadenhall Market, London EC3V 1LT

12. Bram Ellens

Orphans, 2018–2020
Discarded paintings
80 x 80 x 120 cm, 140 x140 x 200 cm, 170 x 160 x 250 cm

In the Orphans, we see how the artist collected old paintings from deceased people to give them a new life. Through undertakers and thrift stores, he managed to lay his hands on paintings that had become “orphaned” after their owner died and the art was discarded by their heirs. All of these paintings that ended up in damp storage basements longing for a new owner, contained both the energy of the original artist as well as the attachment of the deceased owner.

The spirituality of the shape of the Orphans and timelessness of the used material, combined with the ‘family constellation’ of the installation evoke a feeling of resignation and inner silence to the public.

Location: Cullum Street, London EC3M 7JJ

13. Jake Elwes

Latent Space, 2017 (2021 iteration)
Digital video made using artifical intelligence, six hour loop
Dimensions vary

In artificial intelligence ‘Latent Space’ refers to a mathematical space which maps what a neural network has learnt from training images. Once it has been trained it understands all images of trees as existing in a specific area, and all images of birds in another.

The neural network can be reverse engineered to create fake images from these coordinates (Plug & Play Generative Networks: Conditional Iterative Generation of Images in Latent Space, 2016). But what if it was given a new path to travel between these recognisable points, instead moving through the in-between space?

Latent Space is a video snap-shot of an A.I. algorithm in its infancy trained using 14.2 million photographs (ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database, 2009), continuously producing new images.

Special thanks to Anh Nguyen et al. at Evolving-AI for their research. On view in 2020 (15 to 30 June, July, September, November) and in 2021 (January, March and May).

This is a MSCTY soundscape location. See below for more information.

Location: 120 Fenchurch Street, London EC3M 5BA

14. Jun T. Lai

Bloom Paradise, 2019
Stainless steel, FRP, Painting

Jun T. Lai created Bloom Paradise to symbolise hope and love. The artist’s intention was to bring greater positivity into the pandemic stricken world and release healing energy. This artwork reflects the contemporary global cultural value of diversity and heterogeneity.

The work is composed of the “Flower of Hope,” the “Flower of the Sky,” and the “Flower of Life” – a transformation of the spirit and metaphor of a lotus into a three-dimensional sculpture. From pollution to purification, from death to regeneration, the lotus reveals nature’s life cycle. The bright and colourful flowers call to an imaginative world, leading the visitor into a fantasy wonderland. Through this work, the artist hopes to bring positive energy and joy, a gift of life, to everyone.

Bloom Paradise is featured with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and Cultural Division at the Taipei Representative Office in the UK.

Location: Piazza outside Fenchurch Street Station, London EC3M 4AJ

15. Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen

Reactivity, 2017
Gravel and limestone on canvas
200 x 90 x 80 cm

Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen is convinced that we urgently need to restart our partnership with the landscape and its materials through new narratives. We have always made myths about the landscape and invented stories about giants who throw stones. The artist believes we now need to develop new dreams and stories about and in the landscape. Can we create new stories? Can we bring the fantasy, the dreams bag into our local landscape?

The first circuit we learned to control was the carbon cycle. Understanding mathematics, chemistry and physics enabled us to change our surroundings and the landscape around us. Can we practice understanding the change of landscape by connecting us to the raw material extraction?

The work examines how we can create new contact with the body of the landscape, through its materials and encounter with the body of the sculpture.

Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

Location: Cunard Place, London EC3A 5AR

16. Almuth Tebbenhoff

RedHead Sunset Stack, 2014–2019
Mild steel, hot-zinc coated and painted
500 x 110 x 110 cm

The RedHead Sunset Stack captures a bit of the awe that seeing a beautiful sunset inspires in Almuth Tebbenhoff – reduced to the form of a large toy-tower. At the centre the artist put a ragged and unstable human experience in pink and orange which is sandwiched between the steady blue earth and the red sun cubes. The earth and sun may be the only constants we have and even here we are at the mercy of incomprehensible forces.

This is a MSCTY soundscape location. See below for more information.

Location: Mitre Square. London EC3A 5DH

17. Rosanne Robertson

Stone (Butch), 2021
Corten steel, jesmonite and paint
220 x 130 x 156 cm

Stone (Butch) is part of a body of works exploring the terrain of the Queer body in the landscape and was created by plaster casting directly in crevices in natural rock formations at Godrevy Point (St Ives Bay, Cornwall). This ‘sculptural void’ makes physical a negative space created by the power of the sea.

Stone (Butch) considers a ‘raincoat layer’ of the body exposed to external forces inspired by lesbian and trans activist Les Feinburg’s novel ‘Stone Butch Blues’ in which the oppression of lesbian, trans and butch and femme identity is laid bare. This sculpture embodies a space that is shifting and fluid, reclaiming a natural space for Queer and Butch identity from a history of being deemed ‘against nature’.

This is a MSCTY soundscape location. See below for more information.

Location: Bury Court, London EC3A 8EX

18. Laure Prouvost

Metal Man - Deeper Together, Depp Travel Inc. NYC, 2018
HD vide and metal sculpture in two parts
165.5 x 185 x 121 cm

Laure Prouvost’s Metal Man – Deeper Together, Deep Travel Ink. NYC (2018) combines sculptural and video elements that result in an anthropomorphised installation. Two metal figures kneel in front of one another, their ‘video heads’ directly addressing viewers with images of beckoning hands and phrases such as ‘THIS IS THE BEST THING YOU HAVE SEEN FOR A LONG TIME’ and ‘COME WITH US’. Through a strategically manipulative use of text, image, sound, sculpture and editing, the metal men duo directly engage their audience by implicating them in the creation of their narrative.

Location: 70 St Mary Axe (lobby), London EC3A 8BE

19. Elisa Artesero

The Garden of Floating Worlds, 2017
Clear acrylic and blue neon glass
50 x 50 cm base, 200 cm height

The Garden of Floating Words is a neon poem that appears to be floating in the darkness from within the foliage of the garden planter. During the daytime, the words are revealed to be on tall rectangular clear acrylic stands, their structure echoing the tall glass buildings surrounding the garden space, but at night the words alone become the main feature. Using neon, a light source traditionally associated with the city, Artesero creates something ephemeral to make a space for quiet contemplation within the busy complex.

The work was first commissioned by Canary Wharf Group for the Winter Lights Festival 2017. Following inclusion in the 9th Edition of Sculpture in the City, the artwork now resides permanently at 70 St Mary Axe.

Location: 70 St Mary Axe, EC3A 8BE