client: wakefield city council | size: 250 x 70 x 20 cm | site: wakefield | material: bronze | date: july 2007
Designing a work that is about both past and future, that looks to a shared a sense of history and points a way forward is a complex challenge.The work I have designed addresses a sense of the past by referencing the well known culture of the coal mining, and the less known local collection of wedding dresses and bridal gowns held in the Wakefield Museum.
The central form of the work is an S shaped line that divides a rectangle of centrally down the middle. This cut divides one half from the other while at the same time allows a glimpse of front to back. In this S shape could be seen the fragments of a figure or edge of bottle. It traces the act of cutting that is implicit in the thousands of tonnes of coal that are cut from the earth separating seam from seam, cutting deep into the earth dividing rock from rock. The ambiguity of the work’s title is played out in the reference to the cut and sewn seam of a wedding gown.
Standing 2.5 meters tall, slim and self-contained Seams balances a natural organic curve with the crisp hard edge of the rectangle. Like the buildings that surround Crown Court Yard, it marries the delineated discipline of form with the need to move and flow with an easy twist and a natural rhythm.
Despite all its encoded historic reference Seams is resolutely itself. It is about the tantalising glimpses of seeing. A crack in the door, a half opened window, light creeping rounds the edge of a wall. The promise of that which you do not know. One world seeping through into another only half understood. The perpetual play of light and dark where the past meets the future.