A Long Thin Thread/ 1997/98 Heathrow Airport, Terminal 1 Pier 4A, UK

A Long Thin Thread/ 1997/98

 Heathrow Airport, Terminal 1 Pier 4A, London, UK; commissioned by Public Art Development Trust.
This spatial intervention was installed in terminal 1 pier 4A /a bridge walkway in Heathrow Airport where flights to and from Ireland were processed by the British authorities, designed by architect Nicholas Grimshaw in 1993 with its elliptic profile spanning the motorway below. The brief was for the installation to inhabit the space, which was achieved by giving the work a sense of function (disfunction) as it is perceived with most working objects in an airport complex. This installation examined ideas around anxiety, dystopia and the movement of people within the built environment, between here and there.

Casting the curved corrugated interior wall surface to produce a rippled edge, then bungee rope mounding sixty black vacuum-formed spheres, which were uniquely cast to mimic the profile of the building. Within each elliptical form were housed seven-digit counter-clocks (in two colours) with their own built-in memory collectors but as time when on the individual chips started to take on different numbers depending on how they read different groups of people. Installing twin infra-red barrier-beams at each exit of the corridor, this digitally recorded the comings and goings of both the passenger’s movements in red (England) or green (Ireland) from over a period of two years.

This work was featured in the Book: Irish Art 1920-2020 Perspectives on Change by Catherine Marshall and Yvonne Scott, Editors. 2022