WORKS.

Blueprint.

In collaboration with composer and sound artist Ed Carter. We are grateful to Dr Chris Owen (Centre for Genomic Research, University of Liverpool) for his input and support, and to Professor Christian Hedrich and his team (University of Liverpool and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital) for allowing their work to be represented in this piece.

The DNA double helix is one of nature’s most extraordinary sculptural forms - a geometry that unites art, science, and motion in a single gesture. Two spiralling strands twist around a shared axis, perfectly balanced yet perpetually in motion, their rhythm suggesting continuity, harmony, and life itself. Both molecule and metaphor, the helix embodies duality: two intertwined strands, complimentary and interdependent, holding together the coded blueprint of life.

Blueprint takes this natural architecture as both inspiration and framework. The large-scale light sculpture translates elements of real genetic data from the research of Professor Christian Hedrich and his team at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, who study how mutations in individual genes influence childhood autoimmune diseases such as lupus. Working with scientists at the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Genomic Research, the team employed DNA sequencing to identify key genetic variants that alter how the TLR7 gene behaves, paving the way for better diagnosis and more effective treatment.

Within the sculpture, elements of the TLR7 gene’s DNA sequence are mapped onto a responsive lighting composition. Variations in the dataset drive shifts in colour, brightness, and rhythm, referencing the four-colour sequencing chemistry used in Hedrich’s research. These illuminated strands echo the modular rhythm of the double helix itself - a visual melody that speaks of structure, variation, and connection.

The sound component, by Ivor Novello nominated composer and sound artist Ed Carter, simultaneously sonifies the same data into musical form. Taking an evolving aleatoric approach, the composition translates genetic patterns into pitch, tone, and duration, allowing the molecular information to be heard as an ever-changing sequence of sound.

By uniting responsive light and sound, Blueprint transforms complex molecular science into a tangible sensory experience. The sculpture becomes a living architecture - both mathematical and organic – revealing, on a monumental scale, the microscopic patterns of life where data, motion and form converge. In this intertwined choreography of light and sound, the blueprint of life is made visible and audible, revealing beauty within the structures that connect all living things.

Solstice.

Solstice traces the arc of the sun - its slow drift between hemispheres, its breath across the seasons. This invisible geometry, written in light and time, is what steadies the world: a rhythm older than language, older than human memory.

Solstice follows the sun’s ancient path - the slow tilt between hemispheres that governs our seasons and our sense of time. This invisible rhythm becomes visible here, drawn in light and motion, translating the geometry of the ecliptic into an experience that unfolds around you.

As you move through the work, light shifts as though tracing a single day: the bright clarity of noon softens to gold, deepening to the warmth of evening as the sun seems to set beneath the bridge. The space itself seems to exhale, its tones warming, softening, drawing you into the quiet of dusk. What begins as illumination becomes atmosphere - a gradual transformation of colour, temperature, and emotion.

Solstice is a meditation on cycles - on warmth returning to cold, on how light shapes emotion and place. Colour becomes temperature, and temperature becomes memory. The work brings the radiance of the summer sun to the long nights of Amsterdam, offering not just illumination but presence: a moment suspended between day and night, science and sensation, the outer world and our inner weather.

Like much of Studio Vertigo’s work, Solstice explores how light shapes our relationship with place. It invites you to pause in that threshold between day and night, to feel the warmth of summer carried into winter, to inhabit a moment where time feels suspended.

In this perpetual sunset, the familiar is transformed. Time slows, the city glows, and we are reminded that even the briefest light can alter everything it touches.

Spin Me a Yarn.

Spin Me a Yarn features three luminous, oversized yarn balls, each unfurling a glowing thread that loops and winds its way playfully through the surrounding space.
These radiant forms - both familiar and fantastical - transform an everyday object into something extraordinary, inviting us to pause and see the ordinary anew.

With its monumental scale and unexpected placement, Spin Me a Yarn introduces a quiet contradiction: a domestic object reimagined as public sculpture. What usually appears soft, tactile, and handcrafted becomes architectural, luminous, and environmental - a gesture that both delights and disarms.

The work’s title hints at storytelling and fabrication - to “spin a yarn” is to weave tales, to entwine truth and invention. In this sense, the artwork becomes a metaphor for the narratives we construct around consumption, production, and value. Each glowing strand symbolises the invisible threads that connect us to the systems that clothe, sustain, and impact our world.

As light flows through each fibre, Spin Me a Yarn illuminates the complex web of the fashion industry - an industry whose beauty and creativity often obscure its hidden costs. Textile production accounts for around 10% of global carbon emissions, draining water resources and filling rivers and oceans with dyes and microplastics. Each discarded garment, each fleeting trend, adds to the mounting weight of our collective footprint.

Yet the work also holds space for reflection and possibility. Just as yarn can be re-spun, re-looped, and reimagined, Spin Me a Yarn asks us to reconsider our relationship with material culture - to imagine cycles of care, repair, and renewal.

Through light, scale, and play, Studio Vertigo transforms the simple act of looking into an act of awareness. In magnifying the familiar, the piece invites both wonder and introspection - reminding us that the smallest thread can unravel a larger story about connection, responsibility, and change.

End Over End.

The slinky began as a humble coil of steel - an accidental poetry of motion discovered when a ship’s spring toppled from a workbench and seemed to walk away under its own rhythm. From that simple moment of wonder in 1943, it became one of the world’s most recognisable toys: a spiral of play and gravity, looping endlessly down the stairs of memory.

In End Over End, Studio Vertigo reimagines this everyday object at an extraordinary scale. The familiar becomes monumental: a luminous, sculptural form that drapes itself across buildings and rooftops, transforming the city into a vast, dreamlike playground. Each illuminated coil flows in sequence, giving the illusion that the slinky itself is tumbling through space - a continuous wave of light and motion suspended in time.

At this size, the slinky’s proportions are reversed. We are no longer the ones who set it in motion; instead, we find ourselves small beside it, drawn into its hypnotic rhythm. Like Alice in Wonderland, we seem to have stepped into a world where scale and logic are fluid - where toys become architecture and movement becomes light.

There is elegance in the simplicity of its form: two spiralling curves bound by gravity and grace, folding and unfolding in perpetual balance. The work invites reflection on our own relationship with objects, play, and perception - how something so familiar can, through a shift in scale, become uncanny and sublime.

The slinky has rolled through generations since the 1940s, and the number made could circle the Earth more than 150 times. Once metal, later reborn in the iridescent colours of plastic, its story mirrors our changing materials and their impact on the planet. End Over End also gestures toward this transformation - from nostalgic delight to environmental awareness. By reimagining a plastic toy as a monumental light sculpture, it reminds us that wonder and responsibility can coexist: that we can re-envision what we make, and what we leave behind.

In this way, End Over End becomes more than a playful gesture - it is a meditation on motion, memory, and material. A familiar coil reborn as a luminous loop between past and future, tumbling endlessly through imagination.