British artist creates a big splash with water sculpture

Simon Tait

The Times, 10/9/11

The once drab Norwegian town of Drammen has announced its rebirth by unveiling a spectacular centerpiece in the form of a £1.1m, 4m high walk-in water sculpture by the British artist William Pye.

It is the latest in a growing line of contemporary British art that is adorning foreign cities, begun by Barbara Hepworth with her Single Form outside the United Nations building in New York (1964), and Henry Moore’s massive Large Spindle Piece bronze in Jedda (1968).

Pye’s Water Pavilion in Norway follows Antony Gormley’s Habitiat in Anchorage, Alaska (2010); Richard Wilson’s Final Corner, commissioned by Fukuroi City, Japan, to mark the 2002 World Cup; Rachel Whiteread’s controversial Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, also known as the Nameless Library (2000), and the extraordinary Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago, made by Anish Kapoor whose Leviathan is currently stunning Parisians as it occupies the whole of the Grand Palais exhibition hall. In Moscow’s Copernicus Centre, a kinetic artwork by the British collective known as Greyworld was installed last year. On Tuesday (June 1), high in the Austrian Alps, Gormley is to unveil his landscape piece, the 100 lifesize figures of Horizon Field, on Tuesday (June 21).

”Public sculpture is always a sensitive subject and a lot of it, like Bill Pye’s, is the result of public competition,” said Andrea Rose, the British Council’s head of visual art who has been responsible for placing many British artists’ work overseas. ”The fact that there is so much British sculpture abroad is down to the fact that we have so many world-class sculptors in Britain, and it’s the world-class bit that people are really after.”

Pye’s “Vannpaviljong”, to give it its Norwegian title, was unveiled by Dramman’s mayor, Tore Opdal Hansen, recently to mark the town’s 200th anniversary, but also the end of its renaissance. “This is the final piece after a 40 year building process” said Knut Smeby, chairman of the committee of Drammen businessmen that commissioned the piece, adding with a valiant attempt at British jargon, “It is the creaming of the cake top”.

About 40 miles from Oslo and Norway’s eighth largest conurbation, Drammen stands at the mouth of the Drammenselv river which flows into the Drammensfjord, and its timber and paper industries made it a prosperous and important centre. But by 1970, Smeby said, it was dying, “a place on the crossroads where no-one stopped”, with its new electronic and service economy still in its infancy, when it was decided to rebuild. It is now Norway’s eighth largest city and growing, with the unveiling of Vannpaviljong in the centre of the new Strømsø Square signalling the end of the multi-billion pound regeneration. “Bill Pye’s sculpture marks our moving on to the world map”, Smeby said.

Pye, 72, was one of 170 artists who answered an open international competition four years ago to create Drammen’s centrepiece, and emerged from a shortlist of five – against an American, a German and two Norwegians. It was to be the gift of Drammen’s business community to the city, and the theme was to be water.

“It was an anonymous selection process, but the Pye proposition simply stepped out at us as the one,” said Smeby. “It was dramatic, inventive and extremely appealing.”

Pye’s water sculptures have made him the most ubiquitous artist in London’s public spaces, but this was his biggest challenge. “I’ve never been asked to make a whole pavilion that you could walk into before, and the more I worked on it the more discoveries I made about the possibilities,” he said.

Admirers step into the pavilion though walls of water cascading over mirror-polished stainless steel walls while LED light add to the constant movement over the structure. At its centre above their heads is a double skin acrylic dome across which water pulses, the dome’s colour changing with the natural light. At their feet, “starbursts” of water like tidal geysers explode against glass tiles.

The huge piece was too large for Pye’s south London studio and had to be constructed in an industrial fabrication workshop in Dagenham. Transportation costs to Norway alone were more than £40,000.

“It has been one of the most complex projects I’ve done, and Drammen was wonderful to work with,” Pye said. “But like all public sculpture, the proof of how good it is will be in hindsight – how much the people like it.”

“British sculpture is in a period of real excellence which is shown by the way its admired and used all over the world,” said Anne Rawcliffe-King, director of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. “The reputation has grown by degrees, and it is characterised by the inventiveness and attention to detail as well as expertise our artists have show, and Bill Pye is at the forefront of them.”