Discover and Acquire 2013-15
Discover and Aquire comprises two 2.5 metre steel and light artworks commissioned for the Forbes Mellon Library building at Clare College, Cambridge. The artworks celebrate part of the Clare college founding statutes by Lady Elizabeth of Clare in 1359 by using laser cut text both in Latin and English.
At night the sculptures are lit up by slowly changing coloured lighting which both invites a closer inspection of the detail by the viewer and also enhances the surrounding architectural space in general.
Development
Harry Gray
In June 2013 Robert Myers, the landscape architect who was rejuvenating the design and planting in Ashby Court asked me to consider making artworks for the two empty niches which are part of the Forbes Mellon Library. The niches are at ground level and face outwards across Ashby Court to the University Library.
These niches had once housed public pay phones but were now empty and a bit forlorn.
I visited the space during the day and at night and I quickly decided that the artworks needed to incorporate lighting to make the space much more welcoming especially after dark. I had the idea to use laser cut steel to make a screen that would work like a Moroccan lantern.
First ideas centred around the niche’s use as a pay phone booth and I considered piercing a screen with the sound wave pattern made by Alexander Graham Bell’s first recorded telephone conversation in 1876.
I also thought of using a pierced pattern linking the nitrogenous bases present in DNA, made famous by Clare alumnus James Watson.
Instead I concentrated on finding an idea that related to the building that housed the niches.
As the niches were directly underneath the Forbes Mellon Library I thought that a screen with letters coming up from ground level and into the Library would fit the site well. An alphabet would flow upwards like champagne bubbles with the spacing increasing as the letters rose up into the library above.
I needed to find someone who was both creative and an expert in typography to help realise my design.
I showed my ideas to Will Hill, the course leader of the MA in Graphic Design and Typography at Anglia Ruskin University. He was keen to be involved and our creative collaboration began.
Will and I developed the ideas and made a model to present to the Clare Art Committee chaired by Bill Harris in September 2013.
The committee liked the design but asked that the artwork relate more specifically to Clare College.
The idea of resolving the pierced lettering into a detail from one of the College Statutes given by Lady Elizabeth of Clare in 1359 was arrived at in conversation with Anne Hughes, the Forbes Mellon Librarian, Paul Warren the new bursar, Will and myself.
The commission was approved. The pierced alphabet would begin as empty holes then form into letters that would become words that in turn formed sentences. The top 4 lines of the pierced screen would read:
'Discover and acquire the precious pearl of learning'
The college provided this translation and so it seemed fitting to have one side in English and the other in the original latin.
Latin side (North):
pretiosa scientiae margarita [...] inventa et [...] acquisita
English side (South):
discover and acquire the precious pearl of learning
While Will worked on creating a stencil letterform and a composition to cleverly replace letters until words could form the statute, I concerned myself with the proportions of the screens and how they would fit into the niches.
Will Hill
The first question I had to consider was the appropriate typographic genre for the project. While it was important to acknowledge the origins of the statute, (some 100 years before the advent of printed type in the west), I wanted to avoid the conscious archaism of the blackletter types used by Gutenberg and his immediate successors.
The Venetian humanist types of Nicholas Jenson and his contemporaries mark a key point in the dissemination of knowledge, and were revived in the late 19th and early 20th century, notably in William Morris’s Golden Type, and Bruce Rogers’s Centaur, which provided the model upon which I based my stencil fonts. The letterforms would however need to fulfil some unusual requirements: to work in stencil form and to evolve through a series of weights. Beginning as amorphous shapes, and getting progressively lighter with each line, the letters were to follow a gradual transition to a pristine humanist form at the top of the panel.
The second element was the gradual emergence of the text of the statute out of the letters of the alphabet. Harry had talked about a transition from chaos to order.
I devised a system of progressive letter substitutions, through which the sequence of the alphabet was gradually supplanted by the text of the statutes.
The cryptographically-minded should be able to work out the method and decode the system.
Harry Gray
Adding an artwork to an existing and carefully considered architectural space can often look clumsy. To avoid this I made full size plywood shapes and tried them out in the niches until the flute form looked right with the niche’s semi- circular arch.
The stainless steel screens are both wider than the niches and taller, so I decided to make a full size replica of the niches in my studio.
This meant that I could make sure of a method of installing the artworks (steel sheet is not something I wanted to have to adapt on site!)
Making a replica niche also meant that I could spend the time in my studio needed to work out the best lighting solution.
I wanted to make the lighting for the artworks interactive and I worked with Pulsar, a Cambridge- based lighting design company.
The solution needed to be both subtle and exciting. I wanted to reward the viewer who spent some time trying to understand what at first appears random and confusing and then resolves into an answer. This seemed a good metaphor for learning in general.
At night the screens glow with a subtle white light but a sensor triggered by the more curious nocturnal visitor will trigger a coloured lighting display.
