Private View - Memory Foam

Memory Foam is a new public sculpture for One Liverpool Street by Elise Else.

Curated by hypha Studios
Hypha Vitrine, One Liverpool Street EC2M 7AW
PV: Thursday, 17 September, 6 – 9pm
Open: 18 September 2026 – 19 March 2027

“Whoever sets foot in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams, where the most remote past is linked to the events of today.”
Das Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin

Positioned within the vitrine space at the front of a recently completed building by Eric Parry Architects, the artwork exerts a theatrical presence over a new exterior concourse for Liverpool Street Station and the Elizabeth Line. Its graphic forms unfurl outwards to draw the viewer’s attention away from the street into an intriguing interior world beyond the vitrine’s glass. In a perplexingly pareidolic performance of objects-motifs, the artwork’s choreographed elements twist between possible meanings. Sculpturally elucidating a series of spatial narratives from the site’s lost histories, a hand grips a globe balanced on a coil of rope, connecting a silk wheel, a bone, a takeaway sandwich, a silver coin, all posed precariously on an abstraction of melting concrete. These objects merge in a sculptural assemblage of multi-faceted parts, their brick-like textures suspended on structures evoking railway tracks above a ballast floor, where each fragment is meticulously made by hand. A painted backdrop heightens this cacophonous spectacle, amplifying the energy and depth of such a strange
sculptural landscape.

Elise uses the vitrine as a stage for communicating the history of its London site. She brings together themes that have shaped the area, drawing on the Spitalfields Roundels commissioned in the 1990s, created by Keith Bowler, to commemorate its cultural heritage, many of which have since been lost. Reimagining their stories for new audiences, her sculpture rearticulates memories of Huguenot weavers, nineteenth-century Jewish soup kitchens, Bengali culinary culture, a sixteenth-century artillery ground, and other historical narratives as a series of visual motifs. Together they form a sculptural topography, composed of the stories of these lost Roundels. The vitrine’s glass surface acts as a kind of archaeological ground, making visible some of these rich layers of human history. The sculptural elements perform for the viewer like excavated artefacts, their shapes and textures, however ambiguous and elusive, trigger our own memory associations and curiosity as to their possible origin. The sculpture expands its use of these elements to consider the city’s countless embedded histories, succeeded by the present moment that in its momentary existence is already reconstituted as another layer of London’s past.

While the front-facing surface of the vitrine allows the viewer, like an archaeologist, to see into the depths of this rich history, its fixed view, limited to specific angles and perspective, mimics both image and proscenium stage set. There is no opportunity to look behind or beyond the sculpture’s frontal display of forms. One cannot walk around or behind it. So the sculpture’s full dimensionality, detail and volume remain as elusive to the viewer as a picture or a stage set, its three dimensional presence flattened into the surface of a frontal viewpoint. The shallow depth of the vitrine develops this idea, its glass reflecting the viewer’s own image along with the street scene behind as a layer of moving time, set alongside the sculpture, and played out on the vitrine’s impenetrable, flat surface. The sculpture occupying a three-dimensional interior space, albeit exclusively experienced from the outside, introduces a fascinating tension between the intimate interiority
of the sculpture and the vast city beyond. It speaks of the strange dialectics of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Gaston Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space, where contained space opens out onto the infinite possibilities of our imagination.

The context of the sculpture, encased under glass within a shimmering architectural facade, also asks questions of the artwork’s meaning. Its careful presentation reflects its precise rendering. Recognisable shapes are distorted by hand and twisted with machined precision into a state of perfected ambiguity, where they begin to tell stories, but this ambiguity requires the viewer to complete the tales, like artificially fabricated, contemporary artefacts excavated from history for new inquiry and engagement. Their perfect forms and similarly pristine setting place them notionally between consumer product display and museum exhibit, with the key difference between the two being time.

Yet despite their preciseness, the sculptural elements are presented as a precarious sculptural assemblage of jostling forms, each one leaning or pressing on the next, and even more so against the glassy surface of their display case. Defying their careful production, they are presented in fragile formation, part levitating, part falling, a performance of static movement on the verge of imminent collapse. The title of the artwork, Memory Foam, underlines such material instability. Foam is such an ephemeral substance: as throwaway consumer packaging; as a momentary expansion of effervescing bubbles; as the constantly changing shape of synthetic cushioning. Its pockets of air or gas bloat, bubble, or break as they are so brittle. Its fragility and artificiality act as metaphors for memory, with the same transience of the present moment, experienced, discarded and subjectively re-envisioned.

The artwork is composed from this same ephemeral stuff, sculpted from the look of food wrappers and forgotten industries, sections of rope and caricatured symbols of long-lost craft, its faux brick and pitted foam textures concealed here and there under a skin of plaster or jesmonite. This fragile, foamy substance perfectly epitomises the materiality of urban existence. Like the memory foam we sink into at night while we dream, our lives leave their imprint on the city, pressing our individual and collective identities into its streets, our existence embedded in a topography of personal memories, twisting together our own histories, truth, material and meanings.

Elise Else is a London-based artist whose work employs a diverse range of materials, from plaster, clay, polystyrene, paper and paint, to more unlikely substances and found forms. Mixing notions of the artificial, synthetic and organic, her sculptures and paintings interrogate the language of the things around us, drawing inspiration from the human body, nature, industrial production and the built environment. Her references to anatomy, fossils and the botanical are melded together with the pristine perfection of manufactured, mass-produced objects, their combination blurring distinctions between living and processed forms that reveal

intriguing connections between bodies, landscapes and the environments we make and inhabit. For over twenty years, Elise’s practice has been dedicated to expanding the reach of contemporary art, embedding ambitious artworks within architectural and public spaces. Commissioned by organisations as varied as the Wellcome Trust, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Selfridges, Sony and Virgin, she has developed projects that bring art into everyday experience, making it accessible to diverse audiences through shared encounters in the public realm. Her ambition is to create spatial statements that foster curiosity, conversation and connection, while enriching the relationship between people, architecture and public space. Her artworks seek to transform familiar environments into places of imagination, encouraging new ways of engaging with the material world around us.