V&A Museum
When most Ultra Board applications use the board as a print substrate for large format graphics, this installation in the tunnel entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is certainly out of the ordinary. Designed by Studio 8’s C J Lim, whose innovative designs focus on environmental sustainability programmes, in collaboration with structural engineers Techniker, the giant installation was inspired by the scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where she comes across some gardeners painting the roses on a bush.
The V&A gave Lim an entirely open brief to transform the tunnel entrance, but with certain restrictions – because the tunnel is listed, nothing could be fixed to the walls or ceiling and because of the museum's artefacts, materials had to be approved by the V&A and water-based glue was to be used. Their only other prerequisite was that it had to remain in-situ for one year.
What the structure depicts is a “cartouche-shaped topiary, bejewelled with rose blossoms that taper to a crown before sprouting an array of forked branches, whose shadows fence around the grand vaulted ceiling”. This imagining of a mythical underground rose garden was realised by constructing the whole from 18mm Ultra Board MR, (containing 100% recycled paper and board with a protective coating to provide moisture resistance ) as the trunks and branches, with the roses made from rolled up recycled cotton garments. At over 10M long and just under 3M tall, this structure is an arresting sight, but didn’t just have a visual impact, as rose oil created a sensory experience of a flowering garden out of the Ultra Board structure and music from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was broadcast to the immediate area. To emphasise the seasonal nature of the installation, Lim proposed to later switch the t-shirts for scarves to suggest winter.
Dufaylite were provided with the drawings for this piece across 14 designs and hundreds of sections were cut to the precise sizes and profiles in the St Neots factory on the company’s bank of cutting tables.