Infinity Poles 2
2024
As part of the development of the Starbucks Drive-Thru, the developers created a small pocket park to the front that also functions as a public space with seating, lighting, planting and public artwork at the centre.
It functions as a welcoming space for customers, workers and visitors to the area.
The artwork forms the centre piece of the pocket park to the right of Starbuck’s on Gatwick Road. It can be found midway between Gateway 1 and Gateway 5 on the western side of Gatwick Road in Zone 4 (Green)
Designed and fabricated by architect and local artist Karl Singporewala, the totem poles usually tell a story about ancestry, histories, people, or events. These two 8m high poles from Singporewala’s ‘infinity’ series do all four at the same time. The sculptures use John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, as the subject matter to deliver an abstract layered spectacle on a specific period of time in the artist’s life.
The colours represent the artist’s four young children. The helter skelter elements represents a spiral downwards, ‘getting to the bottom, just to go back to the top, and do it all again’. The location is the site of the artist’s father’s old office building - Redifusion/Hughes/Thales, with the golf-type flag poles aesthetic representing retirement. This is mirrored by the own artist’s change in direction, and change in home. The oscillating forms symbolise Grecian Urns and their meaning linked to the new Grecian beauty in the artist’s life.
Another Infinity Pole can be found in the nearby pocket park alongside McDonalds.
Karl Singporewala is a local artist who grew up in Crawley. His father worked for Rediffusion (that later became Thales), which is the site where McDonald’s and Starbucks has been built.
The Infinity Poles are part of the artist’s Infinity series. Each pole is not an ‘infinity’ pole because of its height, but because unlike human reality, on an urn nobody ages, falls ill, breaks your heart, or dies. Like artwork, Keats’ talks about for-evers. Singporewala uses the poles as an autobiographical device, an artwork, his own urn, but unlike a Grecian urn whose silence and distance becomes incomprehensible over time, these sculptures are already abstract; just colourful playful poles by a local artist.
There used to be a bridge that spanned the Gatwick Road and connected the two parts of the Thales site and used to be a well-known feature before Thales moved to a new bigger site on Manor Royal road that opened in 2009.
Another piece by the artist can be found at the Manor Royal Superhub called Keki’s Fusion.
