As part of this year’s Totally Thames Festival (1-30 September), Catherine Yass will be projecting her artwork ‘Turning the Tide’ onto the pillars of the disused Blackfriars Railway Bridge columns (17-20th September). We spoke to her about the inspiration for the work and projecting an artwork onto these iconic pillars.
Catherine was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002 and created the Christmas Tree commission for Tate Britain in 2000. She also has her homage to NHS workers, ‘NHS Swimmers’, on permanent display in a monumental work in Paddington.
The red columns are from the first Blackfriars railway bridge. The top was removed when it was no longer fit for purpose, but they left the columns. I always thought they were so majestic, just standing there in the water. They’re resilient, and they seem to have witnessed all this change in London over all the years.
I love looking down from the north, and the perspective makes them feel like a cathedral or a temple. I just think they’re amazing, and I’ve been photographing them and wondering about them for well over 10 years, and always thinking what could I do there.
I got obsessed with the idea of people standing on columns, and I learned about a fifth-century saint named Simeon the Stylite who lived on a column for 36 years. I was researching him and found that he could only stand on one leg.
My daughter went to a dance workshop when she was younger, and we met an amazing dancer there named Tanya Earhart, who had one leg. I started discussing with Tanya whether someone with one leg could stand on one of the columns, and it was a complete fantasy because you can’t actually stand on them, but then it triggered a different idea.
My daughter is part of Grey Eye Theatre, a company for disabled actors. I approached them and asked if they would be interested in developing a project where we could project their actors onto the columns. The road bridge opposite the columns has viewing bays that align exactly with the railway bridge's columns, so I realised you could probably mount projectors there.
We worked on the project for all of last year and this year, hosting workshops, developing poems that they would move to, and we filmed them. The actors in the films are doing movements related to the poems that they wrote. There’s going to be three people on each column, each on a kind of loop of about four minutes. They also made these amazing patterns with acetate colours, and we projected them onto an overhead projector, which created great wave patterns that are part of the work.
Below the paywall:
What the artist wants us to take away from the work.
The logistics of projecting onto the columns.
A great hidden gem in London.
How this project fits into the artist’s wider practice.
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