Sunday, May 30, 2010

For the last three months I have been working on a public art commission for Cape Town airport – an artwork now inscribed on the thirty metre glass wall at the back of the new IRT bus station. This bus service will carry arriving and departing passengers between the Civic Centre and the airport – a long awaited necessity.

Standing inside the station, looking through the glass, one can see Table Mountain just visible above a messy foreground of rent a car companies. My brief was to make a work which engaged with this view of the mountain, and also with the political and social history of Cape Town.

My solution was to work on both sides of the glass. From the road, or bus side, one can see a landscape of the Peninsula as it can be seen from a high point of the airport, stretching from Muizenberg to Signal Hill, and the sea. Clouds float over this landscape.

Sandblasting the landscape into the glass through stencils.

View of the artwork from the road

The piece is called A Random History of Cape Town, 1499-1994, and passengers on the inside of the bus station can read text inscribed on to the clouds. These texts are quotes from the journals of people from Vasco da Gama through Lady Anne Barnard to Ahmed Kathrada and Nelson Mandela, and range from the poetic and informative to the slightly shocking.
Detail of the clouds from the inside.

Actually, the work is not quite finished. A few of the quotes were considered too liable to cause offence and I am looking for some new ones to complete the piece.

But next time you are at the airport, have a look.