Wring ring

Alex Chinneck is best known for creating surreal and playful public artworks that disrupt the world around us. Chinneck uses simple, playful narratives to weave fantasy into everyday scenes. He has made bricks melt, stone hover and four storey buildings bend and unzip.

The artist’s latest sculpture, Wring ring, takes the form of a traditional British telephone box whose body twists through 720 degrees. Designed to closely mimic the classic phone box, bar the twist in the middle, the artwork is part of a growing series by Chinneck that transforms iconic street furniture into Pop Art.

As always with Chinneck’s work, Wring ring challenges our understanding of familiar objects and materials.

For his twisted phone box, Chinneck appears to have wrestled half a tonne of metal into polite submission. Cast in bronze with window panels that also ripple and twist, the fluidity of the sculpture seemingly transfers from one material to another.