Meshlight

I ran passed the broken concrete gate post that forms the base of this sculptural light on a weekly basis for 5 years, all the while knowing it was meant for me to use but not knowing quite how.

One night in the winter of 23/24 I was scavenging in a derelict brewery building and I slipped in some silt that had accumulated on the concrete yard over decades of puddle formation. I'd noticed a slight texture to the slip, subtle but consistent. When I turned to look at where I'd slipped I could see the shimmer of metal in the moonlight, pocked with a pattern of circles in brown mud.

I knelt down for a closer inspection. Then I touched it and wanted to find the edge. I scraped away with my fingertips and found the edge, lifting it up to reveal a sheet of perforated galvanised steel, the kind used for vandal proofing buildings when they close.

Clearly it had been forgotten when the workmen left behind. Considered not worth the bother.

I however was delighted to find that it was still a neat rectangle shape, was still flat, with undamaged edges and when I washed it the following morning I found it had not rusted at all, and in fact the galvanising had only just lost it's shine.

Intuitively I knew that this perforated sheet and the concrete gate post would work well together. They were a match. So the very next day I drove to the gate post, picked up it's 80kg heft, brushed off the worst and introduced it to the carpeted back of my van.

There was some design with CAD to get proportions right, some experimenting with light to get the effect right and a hesistant request to a fabricator to fold this precious sheet into a square column. (They did a millimetre perfect job!)

During the build process a curator happened to just walk into my workshop and start talking to me about my work. He was mainly interested in projects, not jobs. The things I made for fun.

Meshlight was chosen to be part of the Work-Leisure exhibition held at Yorkshire Artspace in March 2025.