Slate Work East
Slate Work South
2016
Originally designed by Philip Dowson and completed in 1971, the redevelopment and opening of the David Attenborough Building in 2015 included two new site-specific works by the artists, Ackroyd & Harvey. Located on the east staircase off Corn Exchange Street, and the south wall of the Museum of Zoology, both works are constructed from thousands of layers of slate that create a sense of rock strata, as well as discrete habitat spaces to attract a range of wildlife including bats, spiders, solitary bees, and other insects.
Welsh slate is acknowledged as the finest of its type worldwide and the material used in Ackroyd & Harvey works are the waste product from the roof tiling industry, a key element in the sustainable ethos of their artwork. Light grey in colour, the slate has a subtle reflective surface, not unlike a graphite drawing, with subtle shading and tonalities that shift and change with the light.
Slate Work East is inspired by the architectural and mathematical principles found within myriad forms in nature that grow with the inherent numerical order observed in the 13th Century and called the Fibonacci sequence. The design references the ‘golden section’, a simple ratio theorized as symmetry, proportion and harmony. Ackroyd & Harvey have reinterpreted this iconic form in slate, capturing an exquisitely crafted complexity of line that creates a spiral.
Taking inspiration from a black walnut tree in the University of Cambridge’s Botanic Garden, Slate Work South acknowledges both the history of the New Museums Site as the original home of the botanic or physic garden, and Charles Darwin’s iconic dendrogram, or ‘Tree of Life’, sketch from a notebook completed after his voyage on the Beagle, and dated around July 1837, two decades before the publication of The Origin of Species. Often considered the first manifestation of what was to become Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the notebook page is topped with the words, ‘I think’; bringing a sense of the pioneering and powerful processes that led to a renaissance of insight and a legacy that that suffuses the work of the community housed in the David Attenborough Buildings and the networks of colleagues, co-workers, and collaborators CCI Partners represent worldwide.
