Output details

Nail: a sculpture, commissioned by Land Securities for One New Change.

Resting at a slight 5° angle, Nail is a 12-metre high, cast bronze sculpture that sits between Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel’s One New Change shopping centre and the historic facade of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was commissioned by Land Securities and unveiled May 2011.

Nail represents Turk’s thinking about the dialogue between these two ‘monuments’ and the extraordinary changes that have taken place over the centuries in this area, rich in history and heritage. Nail is hammered between the ancient and modern. At this intersection, Nail is a nostalgic recollection of tools traditionally used by the construction industry but less needed in the modern architecture of One New Change. Turk says, in relation to the new buildings that surround it and that “probably don’t have a nail in them”, that Nail “pins the buildings down to the pavement”. Its patinated surface resembling oversize rust on a tree-trunk sized column, Nail underscores the uselessness of this once useful object, while also suggesting the creep of the natural into the territory of the man-made. Nail doubles as a psychological object, which references the symbolic uses of the nail in Christian iconography. Viewed from a certain angle, Nail appears to pin One New Change into the ground, viewed from other angles, it hints at empty space where what was nailed has long since been removed. A giant magnification of a miniature object, the closer the viewer stands to Nail, the more comically abstract the object appears, as by contrast, both the viewer and its surroundings appear to shrink. While Turk has made bronzes before, this is Turk’s first public sculpture. Coverage included: Evening Standard (12 May 2011) Louise Jury; Guardian (1 May 2011) Jonathan Jones; Financial Times (7 May 2011) Jane Ure-Smith.