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Carpenter’s Curve & Brick Field: two works commissioned for permanent display at the Olympic Park, London, UK

Carpenter’s Curve and Brick Field are two 125m long ceramic murals which run along the east boundary of the Olympic Park. They were commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society and the Olympic Delivery Authority in 2010. Woods was selected from 20 artists invited to make proposals for the commission. The two maquette paintings, each 10m long, have close thematic connections to a group of large-scale paintings that were exhibited as Deaf Man’s House (solo exhibition, Chisenhale Gallery, London 2006) in that they draw on urban imagery with indications of dereliction and decay. The work is based on photographs taken by Woods some twelve years before this commission whilst working in the vicinity of the Olympic site. She painted the formerly derelict site as it appeared before redevelopment.

The murals are the result of extensive technical discussion with Jackfield, a historic tile manufacturer still based in their original Victorian factory at the Iron Bridge Gorge. The technical processes to produce the wall were developed by Jackfield with Woods for this project. The image was broken down into sections that could be directly digitally produced with a digital glaze transfer, a section made for stock colour traditional glazed tiles and a section of colours made from screen printed pantone colours onto the tile base. When all the sections of the walls were made they were then water-jet cut to create 88,000 separate pieces of tile to make up the mural surface. This was a huge production job and the fitting took six teams of men over two months to fix to complete. Carpenter’s Curve and Brickfield are the largest tile murals in the country and by far the most complex in the world.

Woods was interviewed for the article Olympic Image Makers, London Evening Standard (8 August 2012).