After winning a competition in 2012, Conrad Shawcross has finally seen his artwork unveiled outside Moorgate Station.
He spoke to LondonWorld about what the sculpture means to him and how he was inspired.
He spoke to LondonWorld about what the sculpture means to him and how he was inspired.
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00:00 The piece is called Manifold and it's essentially a kind of mathematical work.
00:08 It's a picture of a chord falling into silence.
00:11 It's based on a five to four ratio and that's stamped on the base, on the stem.
00:16 But essentially it's a kind of an algorithm which shows this descent towards silence.
00:22 So it's essentially a visualization of a musical chord.
00:25 And it was conceived about ten years ago now for this entrance.
00:31 It was conceived for the Crossrail programme because I won a competition back in 2012.
00:39 And each station had a competition all along the Crossrail line.
00:44 So you'll see that across the Crossrail line there's one commission by one artist and I
00:48 was lucky enough to win this station.
00:51 How did you conceive the idea?
00:52 What was the inspiration behind the sculpture?
00:54 I knew that it would be quite a narrow street so I had to have a kind of very small footprint
00:59 and then grow bigger because I knew it would be a very busy thoroughfare.
01:02 So something large and sort of blocking isn't really appropriate for an entrance of a station.
01:07 You need to really create those flows.
01:09 It starts off very thin at the top like a river.
01:11 It's very thin and fast and as it falls and decays and loses energy and entropy it kind
01:17 of gets fatter and slower like a river.
01:19 And then which obviously helps with the structure.
01:21 So the stem is very strong and supports the sort of tornado like spline as it emerges.
01:27 You can see it very, very kind of stands out against that white building behind.
01:32 The piece is made of bronze, made of hundreds of cast pieces of bronze that were assembled
01:38 in Spain and it was then shipped here before Brexit and it's been in storage for a few
01:42 years waiting for the Wilkinson Air Building to be finished.
01:46 How are you feeling seeing your sculpture stand outside this station now?
01:50 Well, really pleased because it's been a very long process.
01:53 It's been particularly long.
01:55 It's over 10 years.
01:56 So it's been a lot of sort of, we've had to be very patient.
02:01 But it was meant to go in in 2016 or something so it's very late.
02:07 But it's great that it's in and I'm really excited.