Blow & Roll

In 2010, with support from the Polish Cultural Institute, Zięta created Blow & Roll installation in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s John Madejski Garden, as part of the London Design Festival. The aim of the project was to create something that would be visually engaging and would fit to the garden’s scale and style. The challenging part of it was to bring it in one piece, like all the other pieces of the exhibition. The FiDU technology made it possible to create a sculpture that was expanded on the site. The pieces were transported and brought to the garden flat and rolled. Then, the individual steel elements were wheeled flat into the pond, then inflated, giving a third dimension to this unique space. The Blow & Roll installation was made of large-scale steel elements of different lengths up to 20 meters and of different heights. The individual profiles were also presented at Phillips de Pury exhibition space at Saatchi Gallery — available for everyone to inflate using a bicycle pump. It was the first artistic manifesto of bespoke technology on such a scale — playful, appealing and magical — that presented not only the possibilities hidden in pieces of steel but also the unlimited imagination of its creator, Oskar Zięta.