Jacob’s Ladder is a new sculpture created by British artist and designer Gerry Judah for the Gibbs Farm Sculpture Park in New Zealand. Gibbs Farm is a thousand-acre open-air sculpture park in Kaipara Harbour, near Auckland on the North Island of New Zealand. It features over thirty monumental sculptures from a roll-call of top international contemporary artists including Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor and Andy Goldsworthy.
All works are commissioned by Alan Gibbs, a New Zealand businessman, entrepreneur and art collector who has been assembling the Gibbs Farm collection for twenty-six years.
The sculpture is 34 meters (112 feet) high and made out of square-sectioned steel tube weighing 46 tonnes. It is made from 480 lengths of steel, stacked one on top of each other. Each layer is slightly different in length and size, shifted and rotated relative to the layer below, ultimately producing the final gracefully curving shape—this despite the components themselves all being straight steel sections.
all images © David Hartley-Mitchell