INSPIRER SERIES: Luke Jerram - 13.03.15

• www.streetpianos.com
• Multidisciplinary artist from Bristol, deals with interactive pieces and installations, generally focuses on mechanical and technological themes.
• Graduated from Cardiff in 1997 and is happy to apply his creativity to anything: he is not so concerned with giving himself a title of a painter or a sculptor etc. He doesn't like to pigeon hole himself or be at risk of only being associated with certain pieces of work so he is always evolving his practice - this gives him a lot of freedom.
• He made am engagement ring for his now-wife which had the sound of his voice proposing etched into it. He was really interested in the idea of making sound a tangible thing. For his wife's wedding ring he played around with lenses and negatives and made a ring that projected a picture of them and their children when you shone a light through it.

• 'Meteor Catcher'
• He wanted to make a piece that was controlled by the moon: initial tests proved that it worked but he needed a more sophisticated design that didn't make mixing water with electricity and moving parts so difficult. The end result was a round glass bowl of water that spun, and like when you glide your finger around the rim of the wine glass, the piece that contacted the rim would make this round bowl 'sing' in the same way. The sounds would vary in pitch depending on where the moon was.
• He continued this theme of singing sculptures and produced a piece that howled and sung in the wind, inspired by well diggers that he saw in a desert. This piece took a great deal of planning and was extremely expensive. Originally he had intended that the piece be a dome or a construction that you could walk into, but construction and production costs mean that he decided to build only a segment of it himself and pitched the idea by Photoshopping his design into certain settings.

• He gets the go-ahead for many of his proposals now: he stresses that if you deliver each time you are given funding for something, they can increase it every time: they begin to trust you with bigger projects which is how he was able to create this singing wind sculpture that cost around half a million.
• Strapping speakers to hot air balloons and playing them in the sky - an immersive, socially inclusive piece that you didn't have to even really leave your home to see. It divided no one, could be heard and seen by everyone, irrelevant of glass, gender, race or sexuality. It was just simply present.
• Glass sculptures of bacteria and viruses - a lot of scientific publications like to use his work. He got a glassblower to do it rather than doing it himself because he knew that he could not produce the outcome that he wanted. He found them to be really successful and began to sell a lot of them for a healthy sum.

• Pixelated sculpture of his daughter at a train station, dedicated to her.
• Park Slide - Bristol. Huge event, took up the whole street and there was a great number of people. It marked Bristol as a vibrant place to be and really put them on the map - the whole world was talking about it. People could win tickets to go on the slide.
• He has had trouble of people copying his ideas: many cities over the world now do waterslides of their own, some even travel to festivals and places like that. The same goes for 'Play me, I'm Yours.' Many places have set up their own pianos to be played with no reference made to the actual artist. However, while this occasionally bothers him he would rather just move on to bigger and better things, he's amazed by the whole thing.