Cerith Wyn Evans’s Tate commission presented a sticky situation

How do you suspend almost 2km of swirling neon lights from a ceiling that you cannot drill holes into? That was the question faced by Tate Britain’s team of art handlers recently when they set out to install Cerith Wyn Evans’s dazzling light work Forms in Space...by Light (in Time) (2017) in the London museum’s Grade II-listed building. “The ambitious scale and intricate composition [of the installation] demanded a unique method suspend [it] from the ceiling,” says Elsa Coustou, the assistant curator of the 2017 Tate Britain Commission. The team worked with the Welsh artist’s Austrian fabricators, Neonline, to devise a system in which the work is secured to the ceiling via 1,500 Perspex discs filled with a state-of-the-art adhesive. It took three weeks to instal the piece. It is on display until 20 August.