Cover Image: Image © 2014 READS

Singapore is slowly getting a little too warm for my liking recently. Most of the time, I just wished I could soak myself in a tub for most of the day like a hippo (not that I’m fat). But when I saw this on the web, I felt an immediate connection with it.

Lengths of brightly coloured garden hose are arranged to resemble a classical fountain in a work by artist Bertrand Lavier currently installed in the grounds of London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Serpentine Galleries commissioned French artist Bertrand Lavier to create the piece, named Fountain, on a patch of grass in front of Zaha Hadid’s undulating extension to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Hyde Park.

Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lavier, who creates assemblages made from found and modified objects, used sections of vibrantly-coloured garden hoses with plastic nozzles to produce the sculpture. Bound together by cables, the hosepipes are held in an upright position, with their nozzled tips arching over to mimic water trickling from the bowl of a fountain, while in the centre a solitary hose sprays a fine mist upwards into the air. Lavier’s playful simulacra of this traditional fountain got me really delightED and even having a slightest thought of trying to play among it.

Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Image © 2014 READS

Lavier’s work has roots in the Readymades of the French-American conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who once presented a graffitied urinal – also titled Fountain – for display at an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Fountain is a recreation of a pair of fountains that the artist originally installed in the grounds of Versailles in 2009.

 Image Source: serpentinegalleries.org