Overview

Hello Friends by artists Bryan and Laura Davies is a 17.5m high sculpture that presents a science fiction prophecy to the people of Leeds. Installed in 2007 in the public atrium of ‘tall building’ Bridgewater Place, the sculpture addresses the city with a series of photographs flashed through the glass frontage.

The form is a reinterpretation of the seminal work of modernist abstract sculpture Endless Column (1938) by Constantin Brancusi. Reconsidered for today it contains illuminated photographs of scenes rendered in painted balsa wood with model figures that weave together a version of evolution, projections of the future, questions of progress and our place in the universe.

There is an obvious influence of science fiction cinema, notably Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: a space odyssey where computer ‘Hal 9000’ has developed a consciousness. Like Hal, Hello Friends uses its own light and image language to communicate, sometimes it appears to sleep in rhythmic patterns and at rush hour it performs its most animated monologues.