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August 1st 2004A site specific installation by John Elliott.
The Sculpture Trail at Hebden Bridge is a temporary site specific outdoor sculpture exhibition run annually in the National Trust owned beauty spot of Hardcastle Crags, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
Two long parallel lines snake across the floor of the wood a few meters apart. At each end of the lines are 3D silhouettes of houses, encrusted with mathematical or geometrical growths. The entire structure is a vivid light blue. The lines are curving and twisting steel tubes, raised above the leaf litter and vegetation on small 'towers', a kind of Maquette for a giant monorail.
The two lines will talk to each other, reflecting, but not symmetrical or copying the path of the other. The houses on ends, work on a number of levels, on the one hand they act like weights, a bit like 'bolas', they imply some kind of centripetal force, pulling the work outwards. In one sense they are also nodes, or stations if you choose to look at the structure as some kind of sci-fi architectural model. Most importantly though, they carry the kind of genetic marks, or imprints that would have been carried by the helical DNA structure itself; they act as a counter-balance to the perfection of the lines, with their perfect, almost Euclidian form destroyed by their integral fungal eruption of information / noise.
The whole structure will have a very particular dynamic of movement and flow, whilst of course being utterly static. The relationship between the parallel lines will also be referent to the kind of shapes / structures / ideas of DNA strands splitting, changing and (re)combining.







