I had the pleasure of seeing Roger Hiorns’ mind-blowing installation Seizure in London a couple of years ago. When Yorkshire Sculpture Park describe Roger Hiorns’ blue crystal installation as both ‘beautiful and menacing’, they’re bang on. No photograph does it justice, so I am so pleased to announce that courtesy if the Arts Council Collection, the experiential work of sculpture, called Seizure 2008/2013, has been painstakingly transported from its original location in London and is now situated in its new home in a bespoke enclosure near Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Bothy Garden. The installation is on loan to YSP for ten years.
In 2008, Roger Hiorns transformed an empty council flat in Southwark, London, into a sparkling blue environment of copper sulphate crystals. The work was created using an incredible 75,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate, which was pumped into the flat to create a beautiful and somewhat menacing crystalline growth on the walls, floor, ceiling and bath of the abandoned dwelling. 151-189 Harper Road became a site of pilgrimage, with hundreds of people making their way across the capital to the anonymous council flat each day.
Faced with the demolition of the housing block in early 2011, Seizure was acquired by the Arts Council Collection, thanks to a gift by the artist, Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation through the Art Fund, with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation. Weighing over 31 tonnes, the work was successfully extracted from the property in February 2011.
Now, at its new home in Yorkshire, Seizure will be open to visitors at weekends, bank and school holidays and is expected to be highly popular, and once again proves that Yorkshire really is the true center of British sculpture.
Sculpture Curator at the Arts Council Collection, Natalie Rudd described the experience of going inside the work, “When you step inside Seizure you quickly realise that every surface of the flat is covered by a deep layer ultramarine-coloured crystals. It is light enough to find your way around the rooms of the flat, but dark enough to feel like you have entered another world. It is a strange place, but it is also strangely beautiful.”
YSP’s Director of Programme Clare Lilley said: “Seizure, 2008/2013 is an important and stunning addition to the Park, joining experiential works by James Turrell and David Nash. It will provide a thought-provoking and magical experience for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who will enjoy the work over the coming years. In a significant move away from Seizure, 2008/2013’s original urban context, YSP makes a beautiful and bucolic setting for this powerful, ambitious work which will be housed in a purpose-built structure sensitively sited within the Park’s 18th century designed landscape.”
Roger Hiorns is a London-based artist known for working with unusual materials to effect surprising transformations on found objects and urban situations. Hiorns has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and has a number of works in public collections across the country including the Arts Council Collection. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009. The Hepworth Wakefield will also present an exhibition of Roger Hiorns’ work this summer. The entire body of Hiorns’ Youth series will be the first exhibition in the gallery’s new exhibition space in a former textile mill.
Seizure, 2008/2013 is open to the public from Saturday 15 June.
ysp.co.uk/whats-on/this-season
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