Consultancy has partnered with artist Fiona Curran to deliver a publicly sited artwork for the dRMM-designed Turing Locke opening. Located within the sustainable new neighbourhood of Eddington, Cambridge, Bright Shadows Point connects Eddington’s colourful history with its progressive future.
Curran’s sculptures reference research undertaken by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) at Cambridge University. For nearly 30 years, CAU has been unearthing a network of settlements dating back several thousand years, with recent discoveries around Eddington including a Roman Villa, previously believed to have been buried under the local Park & Ride site. The artist took inspiration from the shapes cut into the landscape when archaeologists carry out their digs and the notion of multiple and layered histories.
Eddington was named after the astronomer, mathematician and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, a Cambridge alumni and resident in the local area in the early part of the twentieth century.
Curran was influenced by Eddington’s work as an astronomer as well as the photographs he took during a complete solar eclipse. These images helped to map Einstein’s theory of relativity through capturing the curvature of light from the movement of stars over time.
The creation of these shadows on the landscape, from both the ground level and the aerial perspective, highlights the encounters with the site from multiple perspectives.
Bright Shadows Point refers both to the shadows that are cast on the landscape through former settlement uses, indicated through the archaeology from the aerial surveys, and to the archaeological digs themselves.
Fiona Curran read Philosophy at the University of Manchester before studying at Manchester School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, she teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and works from her studio at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge. An interest in the poetics and the politics of landscape space is central to Curran’s practice. Fiona has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally and has undertaken a number of site-related public commissions.
Watch film about the project