MK Portal

2015
Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes

We are living in the age of the Selfie, so it seemed to me that the opportunity to be surrounded by multiple reflected images of the self might be an appropriate and welcome metaphor for contemporary life.
  • For the Transform Milton Keynes project Underpass 85382H was temporarily turned into a hall of mirrors. The installation was inspired by the modern minimal aesthetic of the commercial centre of Milton Keynes.

    The work attempts to tap into the spirit of Modernism by making something that is geometrically pure, simple and balanced. The mirrors are a device to frame the complex, messy, marvellous, confusion of humanity. Like it or not anyone passing through the MKportal is part of the work, without the people there is no content.

  • Mirrors are interesting things, having spiritual, religious and theoretical scientific significance. According to the principles of classical physics when mirrors are opposed, the repeated images in a totally reflective material would have no limit, going to an infinite number of reflections at the speed of light as time goes on to infinity. But because reality is quantum mechanical there cannot be a totally reflective mirror, so there will always be a probability of absorption meaning that the reflections will become less and less defined until they become individual photons and are finally totally absorbed. In spiritualism there is a superstition that two mirrors facing each other can generate some kind of portal to another dimension, leading to the title - MK Portal.