Pandora

Date
2007

Material
Swarovski Crystal, Steel, Servo Motor, Computer

Dimensions
H240-500 x Diameter 250 cm (H94-197 x Diameter 98 in)

Our work is often a record of actions in a specific moment frozen in time. The permanent capturing of an often very energetic gesture, the flux captured forever. But as well as the moment of creation, the time spent in the presence of the viewer is of equal importance. We very deliberately avoid telling the viewer in a direct way what they should think or feel, what the answer is if you like, but allowing the space for other people to interpret is paramount.

Our chandelier Pandora goes beyond this as it is not a frozen moment in time, but a continuing metamorphosis. People spend time with it, you can’t help it. it is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, it opens your eyes to structure, light, time as you move around it and it refracts coloured light onto you from a colourless object in an ever changing way. It is an explosion, but a serene one.

Pandora was created for Swarovski Crystal Palace in 2007, where we were asked by Nadja Swarovski to reinterpret the classic chandelier. We did this literally by creating the familiar form of a classic empire chandelier and exploding it. The two thousand crystals are suspended in the classic form before slowly erupting in different directions in an array of chaos. After some time the crystals return softly to the chandelier form, only for a moment, before fracturing off in the other direction. For that brief moment we allow the piece to present the figurative to you, the outline and volume of the recognisable, the instant snapshot of familiarity that only a second later will deconstruct into abstraction moving further into complete chaos. It is in a mark of time, our time, memory, our past and the future. Celebrating of our basic values in life projected to you with an animatronic theatrical spectacle of light.