Seed sculpture opens at Eden

The much-anticipated Seed sculpture was formally opened to the public yesterday (June 21), marking the completion of the Eden Project’s education centre the Core.

On June 11, the giant 70-tonne work of art created by the internationally-acclaimed artist Peter Randall-Page was gently lowered by crane into the bell-shaped chamber at the centre of the building.

Yesterday, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Chairman of Eden’s architects Grimshaw and President of the Royal Academy of Arts, performed the opening ceremony in front of 400 guests including the artist and his family, Eden Chief Executive Tim Smit, Judith Donovan of the Big Lottery Fund, and Simon Robertson, Chairman of Rolls Royce and an Eden Trustee who, with his wife Virginia, sponsored the sculpture with a generous donation.

The dedication began with Tim Smit introducing a choir of gifted and talented children who sang a new song to “The Elders of our Community”, including a group of people in their eighties and nineties from Cornwall who were invited specially for the event. The same choir opened a celebration concert on Wednesday (June 20) featuring Peter Gabriel, Show of Hands and Charlie Winston, in the Eden arena.

Tim Smit introduced Mr and Mrs Robertson and talked about the “Capsule” containing letters to the future written by Her Majesty The Queen, who officially opened the Core last year, and ten schools from the Restormel area of Cornwall who led the sculpture on its last journey in a colourful parade before it was installed. Also contained were the hopes for the future of the Eden team.

Mr Roberston placed the container in a trough underneath the flat bottom of Seed, ready for the gap to be sealed to form a time capsule for the next 300 years.

Heralding the completion of the Core and arrival of Seed, Tim Smit said: “It is the strangest and most wonderful thing to build a magnificent structure with its centrepiece missing.

“It feels like finding the last piece of a jigsaw, which makes sense of the whole picture at last. This sculpture is utterly wonderful and worthy of the phrase ‘awesome.’

“It draws together everything that Eden is about – the perfection of nature and the difference between substance and hype.”

He added: “We have been so lucky with our friends and collaborators who shared a vision that we hope will mark a moment for reflecting on our generation’s need to work with the grain of nature, rather than against it.”

Sir Nicholas said that there was a lot of talk about the relationship between art and architecture and here was a relationship between a sculpture and a building that really worked.

He said the Core was a building with the lowest carbon footprint it was possible to have, adding: “Until the seed arrived, it was as if the building was missing a vital organ.”

Images available at www.kasstzam.com
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