As the artist commissioned for the inaugural SCULPTURE AT Bermondsey Square, Karen Tang faced the combined challenge of creating a work that would engage local audiences, withstand wear and tear brought by the more inclement months of the year, and satisfy her own aesthetic and conceptual curiosity. As a new multi-use environment with markets, bars, restaurants and heavy footfall, Bermondsey Square promised to be an ideal location for public art. In the research phase for creating her work Synapsid (2014), Tang delved into local history, accessing Bermondsey’s popular imagination via a 1959 sciencefiction film set and shot in the area.
The original storyline for The Giant Behemoth featured a radioactive blob working its way up the Thames to Rotherhithe Docks and Bermondsey. This amorphous character was later recast as a mutated dinosaur, but its fluid form inspired Tang to make a work that investigated the contrast between organic shapes and the rigid formality of the new buildings around Bermondsey Square. It also invited people who saw it to consider the relative values attached to formal and informal aesthetics, in particular in relation to built structures, a relevant issue in a city where the straight and narrow Shard shares the skyline with the curvy Gherkin and where buildings with seemingly spontaneous outlines were some of the stars of the 2012 Olympics, for instance Zaha Hadid’s sinuous Aquatic Centre and the ‘pringle’ velodrome.
First working in soft materials such as plasticine, Tang modelled a number of small sketches for the sculpture, later realising the full-sized work in wood particle board and Styrofoam, which she covered in fibreglass using a technique for glassing boats. Shaped roughly like a plough with mottled jade green treads resting on the ground and a pair of appendages rising up over bilious yellow doughnut-shaped windows, Synapsid’s parts were joined by visible bolts, revealing the work’s construction. Somewhat reminiscent of the fused plates of a human skull, or the stitched-together parts of Frankenstein’s monster, Synapsid’s component parts and alarming colours harked back to the toxic monster that had inspired it.
As the first sculpture in the new square, Synapsid drew avid interest in how, over the course of six months, people would respond to it and how they might interact with this awkwardly shaped and coloured work, which, as Tang explained, ‘hovers between representation and abstraction’. One week, the sculpture was co-opted as an impromptu market stall, at other times it was adorned with posters and used as a climbing frame or a resting place. These uses hint at the various interpretations of the work, producing a range of different meanings for Synapsid. When the work travelled to Plymouth in the autumn of 2015 for a four-month sojourn, it mirrored the movement of the Giant Behemoth in the film, which had also travelled to the port city. The potential for mutability inherent in the work suggests that Synapsid may develop even further, as Tang suggests that ‘it may tour again, get a revamp or even new colours’.
Text: Ellen Mara De Wachter
Generously funded by Arts Council England, The National Lottery, Ideas Tap, and Bermondsey Square Community Fund. With additional support from Team London Bridge, Shortwave Cinema, We Are Goat and Southwark Council.
Media Partners: ArtReview and Elephant Magazine.
