Chinneck’s ‘Pick Yourself Up & Pull Yourself Together’ in the Hungerford Car Park.
Our latest Curiosity of the Week is something rather unusual that can be seen hanging around in a London car park, but only until Wednesday 25th February 2015…
The car in question is British artist Alex Chinneck’s new sculpture, Pick Yourself Up and Pull Yourself Together. Following on from 2014’s ‘floating building’ in Covent Garden, Pick Yourself Up and Pull Yourself Together sees Chinneck hang a new Vauxhall Corsa 15 feet in the air, while still attached to the road at London’s Southbank Centre. The gravity defying piece of parking will hang in Hungerford Car Park, beside The London Eye, until Wednesday 25th February 2015.
Speaking on the artwork, Alex Chinneck said, “I see sculpture as the physical reinterpretation of the material world around us and so by introducing fictional narratives into familiar scenarios, I try to make everyday situations as extraordinary as they can be. I choose to do this through illusions because I think there is something both optimistic and captivating about defying the realms of possibility.”
How is your parking?
“With an effortlessly curling road I hoped to transcend the material nature of tarmac and stone, giving these typically inflexible materials an apparent fluidity. Vauxhall Motors allowed me a great amount of creative freedom and this collaboration offered my studio an exciting platform to explore new areas of engineering and fabrication”.
After making Covent Garden hover with 2014’s ‘Take My Lightning, But Don’t Steal my Thunder’ and ‘A Pound of Flesh for 50p’ where a house in Southwark gradually melted to the ground, Alex wanted to create a public installation of significant sculptural and theatrical impact, which complimented the new Corsa’s design.
“Simple in concept yet structurally, technically and logistically complex, this project looks to deliver an experience that can be appreciated by different people for different reasons. While I am most excited by the hidden engineering and complex manipulation of concealed steel, others will simply enjoy the accessible theatricality of the illusion at play,” said Alex Chinneck.
‘From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes’ in Margate.
Chinneck is a British artist and designer who lives and works in London. Uniting art, architecture, theatre and engineering, his public installations are considerable in scale and ambition. Each of Chinneck’s projects are conceived in response to the place in which they stand and so they are unique and belonging to their location.
The projects have included using 1248 pieces of glass to create the illusion that 312 windows of a dilapidated factory in Hackney had been identically smashed and cracked, and the sliding of the entire brick facade from a seaside house in Margate into the front garden of the property. Chinneck has also inverted two four-storey buildings beside Blackfriars bridge, and constructed a full size house from 7500 wax bricks that proceeded to melt over 30 days. Recently he created the illusion that a stone building upon Covent Garden Piazza had miraculously levitated into the air.
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