Meta Table Setting

Linda Florence creates large scale, surface pattern spatial interventions which challenge audience expectations and invite personal engagement and response.

She was commissioned by the Sheffield Millenium Gallery to create an installation for their main entrance hall, a busy public space. The project, Meta Table Setting, aimed to focus participants’ attention on overlooked surfaces and environments such as floors, glass walls, hallways and lifts.

Florence based her designs on research into the history of metalwork using the museum’s world-famous collection and archive of Sheffield-made cutlery and tableware. The large-scale floor prints were applied as hand-cut, screen-printed, flocked sandpaper. The normal pattern of visitors’ steps was disrupted – both visually and physically – as they explored the different textures of the sandpaper surfaces with their feet, prompting consideration of the rhythms of their steps, and of the images and designs.

A further element of the work, also drawing on cutlery design, was produced in vinyl around the glass sides of the gallery’s lift, alongside scratch-card silver wallpaper depicting outlines of Sheffield metal hallmarks. Visitors were invited to scratch their initials into the hallmarks, creating marks of their own, thereby engaging with and shaping the content of the exhibition.

Meta Table Setting was named the British Surface Design of the Year in the 2009 British Design Awards.