Commissions and Education
River Festival
Double Helix/The Maidstone Marker (1)
/Force of Water (1)
/Morning Thoughts (3)
Lockmeadow
Double Helix is a dual commission by artist David Anand and poet Peter Carpenter installed in 2001.
The artwork is a 60m long, giant steel representation of the structure of DNA; a vastly magnified form of the blueprint for all life. Double Helix was nominated by Arts Development for the Rouse Kent Award in May 2002. The piece was short-listed and was voted as runnerup by the judges.
Double Helix was created for the Whatman Park site and is constructed of metal, one of the five elements of nature, and represents DNA, without which life as we know it and the human interaction with nature would not exist.
"This is it, now, a shape cut in time.
It’s a tracer line from the year dot
moving on from its first form:
a pulse, a curl in fluid continuous creation
lightning sketched, a steady course
in fire then beaten out of us.
We follow its orders with a smile,
a double-take, something in the eyes.
It ripples like the bars of a mackerel sky,dissolves sun into ice,
shore into tide.
We cannot break the code,however hard we try."
(Peter Carpenter, 2001)
