UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 18 JULY 2023
Birmingham City University (BCU) officially unveiled the city’s latest piece of public artwork this week.
Lip-sync – a sculpture produced by artist Holly Hendry, commissioned by BCU and curated by Digbeth-based Eastside Projects – is located outside the university’s striking new STEAMhouse building, at the junction of Cardigan Street and Jennens Road.
The work reflects STEAMhouse’s role as a centre for collaborative innovation where immersive technologies and digital fabrication meet hands-on making, research, business support and community building.
BCU is recognised as a pioneering force for the STEAM agenda, which places the Arts at the heart of traditional STEM disciplines to drive innovation, enterprise and economic growth.
Made from rolled, formed and laser-cut steel, with smaller hand-cast Jesmonite elements, the sculpture’s 4-metre-high surface features cartoonish, body-like shapes co-developed with students from BCU and pupils from Chandos Primary School in Highgate.
Lip-sync’s surface is made up of individual elements that are rolled and fixed together, with different parts engineered, coloured, stretched and flattened by multiple industrial processes.
Its structure echoes the Jacquard Loom, a textile weaving machine in which thousands of punch cards were used to produce fabrics with patterns of almost unlimited size and complexity.
The loom, and the Jacquard cards which it reads, is considered the earliest example of computer software. Its punch card system led to the binary system of ones and zeroes that underpins modern computing.
Lip-sync is the first public artwork commissioned by BCU for its city centre campus.
STEAMhouse, a £70 million innovation centre, opened its doors in October 2022 and has already supported dozens of businesses and start-ups across the region.