Brendan Jamison

SUGAR CUBE TOWER

On July 1st, at the Towner Museum of Contemporary Art (A new 8.5 million pound purpose built visual arts venue on the coast of England's popular seaside town of Eastbourne) Brendan Jamison's gigantic sugar cube TOWER was unveiled, a colossal 16 foot tall sculpture that has been built over the past three and a half years from a quarter of a million sugar cubes. The total weight of the sculpture is 506 kilogrammes (over half a tonne) and is the largest sugar cube sculpture ever created in the world.

A sprinkling of loose sugar crystals radiate outwards from the base of the tower. Waves of cubes ripple across the gallery floor. The crystals can reference the chalk erosion from the nearby Beachy Head cliff, the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. The installation also interacts with the interior architecture of the gallery and plays upon the viewer's perception of scale. On an other level, the sculpture captures a child-like sense of wonder and notions of the fairytale. Within a local context, the structure of the tower can reference elements from the coastal Martello Towers, Redoubt Fortress and the Belle Tout Lighthouse.

This project was jountly funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Towner Museum, Eastbourne. Jamison's chief fabricator, Karin Bamford, assisted in the construction of the sculpture.

The exhibition of contemporary British sculpture is titled 'Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive' and is curated by Sanna Moore. It is a group show of six new works by sculptors who obsessively use small scale repetitive processes to create large scale sculptural installations, also featuring Susie MacMurray, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Claire Morgan, Jill Townsley and Henry Seaton