‘Silicon Spa’ Public Sculpture

This public art commission for Spencer Yard, Leamington Spa, draws inspiration from the town’s significant gaming industry. It responds to the site’s history as the home to the Camofleurs and its future use as digital creative production hub, and home of The Fold.

The Pangaea in-house design studio worked up a series of concept proposals to the client brief, with one being taken forward into detailed design. The artwork, a series of three sculptures of cacti and a mountain, was produced and installed by Pangaea Fabrication using state-of-the-art 5-axis milling technology, alongside detailed painting by hand of the 1,000s of small multi-coloured triangles, carefully colour-matched to those of the Nanite technology the artwork is referencing.

The artwork, installation February 2024, considers the effect of digital animation and visualisation on both art and the lived experience, and how this relates formally and conceptually to the Camoufleurs; artists who had been enlisted to creatively camouflage and protect sensitive sites in the UK, and were based at the site. Put simply, the Camoufleurs were commissioned to use artistic techniques to distort perception and a sense of reality. Today, the biggest distortions to our perception are created in the virtual world but impact the physical, where what is fake and what is real becomes harder and harder to distinguish and is even a matter of conjecture.