LONDON.- Acclaimed New York-based artist Sarah Sze has transformed a disused Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye train station in south London with a new site-specific sculptural work, Metronome. Co-commissioned by Artangel, the exhibition, titled The Waiting Room, opened on Friday 19 May 2023, taking over a large, vaulted space above the main ticket office that has been boarded up for sixty years.

Sze employs painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and video to build immersive works that explore our relationship to images, materiality, time and entropy. In recent years, she has created a new form of sculpture that offers an extraordinary model of our fragile world.

These large-scale installations – which she refers to as Timekeepers – integrate everyday materials, torn photographs and a multitude of flickering videos in immersive environments with their own fragile ecologies. These works explore the tenuous threshold between the digital and the analogue, the tactile and the imagined.

Metronome is a dense matrix of thin stainless-steel tubing. Within this structure, a convex form made up of a large number of torn pieces of paper and card resembles a section of a globe or planet. Unlike a conventional globe however, it is open and dynamic. Substantial though the structure is, it is also fragile, alluding to the thin membrane of life on the surface of our planet that scientists refer to as ‘the critical zone’. Both the ‘globe’ and the walls and ceiling of the space are illuminated by fragments of moving images beamed from 42 video projectors installed in the structure to create a vast magic lantern.

Sze’s work conveys the velocity and volatility of life in the age of the smartphone. The writer Zadie Smith recently compared the experience of Sze’s installations as like being in an opened-up iPhone, with the technology taken apart and the image bank it stores exploded into three-dimensional space. Local and global, the momentous and the incidental are held in a precarious equilibrium.

Sarah Sze said: “I’ve always been interested in certain times throughout history where our relationship to the way we experience time and space in the world speeds up radically. The invention of the aeroplane, the invention of the train, you see really interesting work coming out of that time, in film, visual arts and writing. We are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace.”

James Lingwood and Michael Morris, Associate Directors of Artangel, said: “Sarah Sze creates dynamic sculptural environments that somehow account for the vertiginous experience of living on our fragile planet. We’re delighted Artangel is premiering what promises to be an extraordinary new work in London.”