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| 36 Elements: Glass Wall |
| Title: | 36 Elements: Glass Wall 2001-2 |
| Description: | Sandblasted and etched glass wall and reflecting pool. |
| Dimensions: | 14 x 14.6 x 3 metres |
| Location | Divides the 'Hanging Garden' on floor 5 from the escalators
on floors 5-8. Marunouchi Building at Tokyo Station |
| Client: | Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd. Tokyo |
| Architects: | Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei Inc. |
| Advisors: | Vivien Lovell, Janet Koplos, Kisa Kawakami |
| Produced and supervised by: | Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei Inc, MEC Design International Corp, The Contemporary Sculpture Center, Tokyo |
| Art Agent: | Modus Operandi, London |
Artists Statement
In May 2001 I was invited to make a proposal for Marubiru, the new Marunouchi Building in Tokyo. The Hanging Garden was described in the Artists Brief as ' a memorable Peoples' Square'. This high up public space is divided from the escalators by a five storey structural glass wall and it was the spatial possibilities of this wall to create a 'sense of place' that interested me. A reflecting-pool at its base gives the glass wall the appearance of passing through the building.
For the Glass Wall, 36 ' Elements' have been arranged in a grid. Originally produced as ink drawings they have been recreated here as deeply sandblasted and etched images in glass. They appear suspended in the glass and were designed to respond to the changing viewpoints of people moving around the space of the Hanging Garden and up the escalators.
The images are cut into the glass like silhouettes with deep edges implying a thin section or fine structural substance. Although carved as a negative they are capable of casting shadows. They are equivalent to elements within Nature but also to elements within precisely engineered man-made structures. They are accumulative images over a period of time, made active by each other, the viewer and the site.
© Susanna Heron 2002
In her overview of Heron's work for Elements , Heron's exhibition at The Mead Gallery in January 2003 Caroline Collier wrote:-
'The Elements drawings... are in a sense metaphors for scale and for time (the other dimension of space). Like mathematical systems, they are elements, essences, reproducible at any size. They can be used in the building in Tokyo, in a London street, on the walls of a gallery or as tiny prints. Like found objects they are transportable; but the experience of the works is specific, rooted in a particular time and place.'
'Her independent combination of seriousness and wit has allowed her to make a body of work not confined by conventions or hierarchies but working in between or underneath them to disrupt notions of the obviously monumental and to put across the values of accumulation, of small details, apparent co-incidences and the fleeting instant:'
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