Starslide: A Symbiosis of Form and Function

I am at present working on Starslide (Fig. 1), a sculpture commissioned by Guy's and St Thomas' Charitable Foundation for the Evelina Children's Hospital, which was designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners and is part of the St. Thomas's Hospital complex on London's South Bank.

The brief was unusual in that I was asked to conceive a sculpture that would also be a completely interactive object of play: a children's helter-skelter (a spiral slide). Creating a work of art that is also functional under the extremely tight safety regulations that exist in a children's hospital is both complex and difficult, but I am interested in the way in which function can guide and enrich sculpture.

I have worked with cones since the 1960s, examining the endlessly interesting geometry of the cone in as many ways as I could. The cone is in many cultures the symbol of the sacred mountain, the icon of the spiritual path to universal consciousness. The cone is also an astronomical form in that its sections describe the orbital trajectories of planets and comets. I called the first large cone, which I made in 1969, Anti Gravity Koan because I felt that in it I expressed an important human paradox: the dream of escaping gravity and the biological necessity of living within its embrace. Children's huge pleasure in sliding down a helter-skelter is often mixed with fear and trepidation. They are enacting the gravity game, the almost ritual delight in escaping from and being captured by earth's gravity.

Fig. 1.

Digital rendering of Starslide in situ, from artist's maquette, commissioned by Guy's and St Thomas' Charity, at the Evelina Children's Hospital.

© Liliane Lijn

Fig 2.

(a, top) Detail of Starslide slide. Digital photograph of the lower 3-meter section of Starslide, taken from above, looking at concave slide curving around conical structure still in its fiberglass fabrication mould. (b, bottom) Detail of slide inside Starslide. Digital photograph of the lower 3-meter section of Starslide, taken from inside the conical structure. In the upper right of the image, part of the spiral slide can be seen as a convex serpentine form. To the left, the inside wall of the structure is visible.

© Liliane Lijn

Starslide (Color Plate D) is a 5-m-high and 4-m-base-diameter cone with a 400-mm flat top, cast in glass-reinforced polyester resin, with a 0/1 British Standard Fire Rating. The slide, unlike the mythical Ouroboros encircling Mount Meru, is molded into the cone, allowing a 600-mm-diameter elliptical curvature with headroom of 1,200 mm. The slide is thus deep enough to safely cradle a child. The slide drops at around 30°, with between 5 and 10° for the run-in and run-out sections. The run-in section is the first meter of the slide and the run-out section is the last meter. These respective lengths are determined by the length of the sliding section and increase proportionately as it does. The slide ends at floor level, meeting an elliptical area of colored rubber 105 mm deep and extending 2 meters from the end of the slide.

Children will access the interior through a wave-shaped opening (see bottom left in Color Plate D) in the cone and climb a 20° ramp that curves along the inner convex spiral of the slide to reach an opening leading to the slide itself. I am planning to use a micro-LED lighting strip along the edges of the ramp and the spiral of the slide. On the inside these take slightly different paths because the inclination of the ramp must not be steeper than 30°. The blue and red light strips both accentuate the internal double spirals and provide the lighting for the interior.

My work involves a dialogue between opposites; my sculptures use light and motion to transform themselves from solid to void, from opaque to transparent, from formal to organic. In Starslide, I am...