Internationally established artists were commissioned by the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) to create works for incorporation as permanent features within its new building. The significance of this commission was its interrelation with architecture in a new centre whose specific remit is to combine fine and applied arts on an equal footing in a northern region of the UK undergoing regeneration. It was my first opportunity to create an original site-specific work in a public building and interrogate the idea of an artistic intervention in architecture, questioning the nature of such art and the intentions that underpin it. The project purposefully blurred and merged the boundaries between art, design, craft and architecture, creating ambiguities that question them. My two-year period of research for the whole installation of lighting and artwork aimed to delineate the rectilinear space and people passing through, thus addressing both the existential emotive space as perceived and experienced and the abstract logical space of Cartesian projective geometry.

My particular challenge was to animate corridors, usually purely functional areas. The design developed as a configuration of lines of light set in walls, ceiling and floor and a sheet-metal form set into the walls and ceiling of the corridor. The even distribution of light over a three-metre length an aesthetic effect demanded by the overall concept involved a year of original research with engineers at Universal Fibre Optics Ltd. This successfully resulted in a method of creating lines of light in the fabric of the building which in turn has led to further development as the basis of a new commercial product, having great potential in its applications by artists, designers and architects. The project was funded by the Percent for Art scheme.