Simon Hitchens Unity
Rapid prototyping specialist CMA Moldform is the company behind the resin casting technology used to make a huge new artwork that has gone on display at Kings Cross Central in London.
Unity is a massive six-tonne sculpture made out of granite and tinted blue resin combined to form a 3.8 metre-high monolith by notable sculptor Simon Hitchens. The piece has been installed at the former Goods Yard.
The piece is sculpted from two materials. Bon Accord granite from South Africa was drilled and cut at Fyfe Glenrock, Aberdeen, then finished at Hitchens' studio in Somerset. It weighs four tonnes.
The large mould weighs some 450 kgs and the tinted polyurethane resin was cast at CMA's new facility in Birmingham - a highly technically challenging single pour cast. The finished resin pat weighs 1.6 tonnes.
Urbanest commissioned the sculpture through Camden Council for the new site at Kings Cross Central and Hitchens was handed the contract for the commission at the beginning of the year.
A statement about the artwork by Hitchens reads: "This graphic sculpture visually references the heavy engineering used in the area's industrial past, its form suggestive of two large and redundant cogged wheels. The granite element symbolises the robust building materials used in the old Goods Yard, where commodities were moved about by rail and cart. The more technologically challenging blue resin element hints both at the Regents Canal and the important part it played in the transport of goods, but also the aspirational state of the art future being built at Kings Cross Central. The simple graphic form of the sculpture can be seen as a stylised letter X, but also articulates the unity between two separate yet co-dependant bodies: a balance of essential opposites and a celebration of progress across the generations."
CMA Moldform's Peter Turnock said: "This unique piece of artwork creating Simon Hitchens depth of design goes beyond the normal boundaries for this sort of sculpture. It combines two very different materials and shows that CMA can produce the artist's imagined designs."
