‘Transformation’

Client: Anglian Ruskin University
Artist: Annie Cattrell
Fabricator: Other Fabrications
Architect: Richard Murphy Architects

Positioned across two sides of the five storey Science Centre, a flagship building for Anglia Ruskin’s University’s Cambridge campus. The art celebrates the transformative process of experimentation and change within scientific teaching, learning and research. It also aims to reflect the transformation of lives and societies through education and research.

The artwork is made of tens of thousands of suspended coloured anodised aluminium squares, which reflect and refract the surrounding light and move as the weather and environmental conditions change.

Annie said: “The concept that underpins Transformation is informed by one of the main aims in the design of the science centre which is to see science in action.

My plan was to animate the west and south faces of the 90-degree corner of the building. This was in order to give it a unique, ever-changing focal stimulus that reinforces the identity and purpose of the new science centre as a hub for knowledge, academic excellence and creativity.

It is also intended to act as a metaphor for the transformative nature of energy and learning, in this case, the momentum that can happen in scientific research and its on-going impact on the world beyond academia.”