The beauty of Concrete

Sunday 21st February, 2021

We cannot lie; we love concrete, whether it is an engineered water management solution or a simple concrete house inspection chamber, we love concrete, which is why, and we couldn’t wait to work with Brazilian artist, Alexandre da Cunha when he approached us about a sculpture.

Influenced by mass production items from the building industry and artisan craftsmanship,  Alexandre was commissioned to produce a sculpture for The Box, in Plymouth – a £46 million museum, gallery and archive, celebrating the city’s heritage and contemporary art, as part of their inaugural exhibition ‘Making It’, along with five other international artists.

The show aims to compare and contrast the different ways we can “make it” from the labour intensive nature of manufacturing and fabricating artworks and objects of material integrity, referencing Plymouth’s history as a city of makers and crafts people.

Alexandre da Cunha’s practice is predominantly based around the “readymade”, whereby he appropriates and slightly changes objects, revealing their inherent beauty.

For the exhibition, Alexandre wanted to show the beauty of precast concrete and our Technical and Production teams worked with him to achieve this. Placed within the circumference of the compass rose on the historic foyer floor, the 1800mm precast concrete chamber structure, with cut-outs that were prepared and finished at our Mells, Somerset works, to show the integrity of the exhibit, is definitely a stunning figure.

The sculpture, named Figurehead II refers to both the post-war buildings and reconstruction in Plymouth and the architecture of da Cunha’s birth city of Rio de Janeiro, where concrete is a key component.

For more information about The Box in Plymouth, please visit Welcome to The Box | The Box Plymouth

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