Jim Lambie Research

Jim Lambie is an artist who uses tape on the ground to make simple spaces into artistic visual pieces. He was short listed for the 2005 turner prize award, influenced from their bright colours and ability to create depth using tonal values. He uses the vinyl tape to trace the shape of the room to reveal the contours of its architecture. The use of colour is to inject energy into somewhat boring spaces, which can be seen in his works amongst silent galleries and stair wells. “For me something like Zobop, the floor piece, it is creating so many edges that they all dissolve. Is the room expanding or contracting? … Covering an object somehow evaporates the hard edge off the thing, and pulls you towards more of a dreamscape.” – Lambie.

His work interests me in the way it changes a space through the use of its own architecture. The random colours inject energy into the room which was previously bland, or in terms of my work industrialised (the city centre). The tape is there to draw attention but not to distract from the original spaces, I believe this could be useful when considering the way, I could present pictograms in context without distracting from the whole reason of the way finding system. I also like the idea of the contrast between the way Lambie describes his work “pulls you towards more of a dreamscape” in comparison to the nature of a wayfinding system traditionally being very set in stone, the contrast between the two could work well as a single unit.