Exhibition
Roger Hiorns - Seizure - Artangel
One of the most high-profile installations to be launched in the UK last year is set to re-open on 23 July. Roger Hiorns’s major sculptural project “Seizure” - a derelict South London flat transformed by the UK artist into a cavern coated in copper sulphate crystals – first opened late last year. The work led to Hiorns being nominated for this year’s Turner Prize.
“After the project opened, 157 Harper Road became a site of pilgrimage. Every day hundreds of people would make their way across the capital to go inside this anonymous flat near the Elephant & Castle,” said a spokeswoman for Artangel, the non-profit public art facilitator who commissioned the piece.
Hiorns pumped over 75,000 litres of copper sulphate solution into the abandoned housing complex to create a thick, shiny, jagged crystalline growth (visitors are required to wear Wellingtons) on the surfaces of the building.
A £1 million commissioning initiative will soon open its latest contemporary art commission. The Jerwood/Artangel Open was launched in 2006 to tap into the unrealised artistic potential in this country, with a focus on different sites and situations around Britain. This has offered an unparalleled opportunity for emerging artists of all disciplines to propose ideas for projects in relation to specific sites across the UK.
The programme received almost one thousand entries and has been delivered in partnership with Arts Council England and Channel 4, also with a significant financial contribution from the Arts Council.
The Open’s first commission comes from Roger Hiorns and his work ‘Seizure’. The artist has previously worked with a number of substances – from disinfectant to fire – focusing on the physical and aesthetic transformations. In this, his most ambitious largescale work to date, Hiorns promises the development of an extraordinary chemical intervention in the heart of the city. The artist will work with copper sulphate to create unexpected physical forms in a social housing block near London Bridge.
British artist Roger Hiorns makes works with detergent, disinfectant, perfume, fire and copper sulphate crystals. He uses these materials to effect surprising, physical and aesthetic transformations on found objects.
Hiorns was nominated for the Turner prize
