The Glass Sculptures Built to Argue With a Skyscraper’s Own Geometry

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Gabriele Beveridge’s Glassed In Dreams filled the entrance hall of 100 Bishopsgate with three sculptures built from industrially manufactured glass and hand-blown organic forms, a formal argument that echoes the tower’s own design logic. Curator Vassiliki Tzanakou commissioned the work through an open call that asked forty artists to respond to a George Oppen poem about the tension between the individual and the crowd, a fitting brief for a lobby forty storeys of commuters pass through every day. The commission ran for a year and was one part of a wider push, backed by real data on how few public sculptures in London carry a woman’s name.

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Introduction

Gabriele Beveridge’s Glassed In Dreams filled the entrance hall of 100 Bishopsgate, the 172 metre City of London tower designed by Allies and Morrison, with three large scale glass sculptures from March 2025 until the installation closed in February 2026. The commission was the result of an open call run by Brookfield Properties, the tower’s developer, in partnership with the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA), and curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou, an independent art historian with a specific brief: find work that would respond to the building itself rather than simply occupy it.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. A corporate lobby is an unforgiving site for sculpture. Thousands of people move through it daily, most of them not looking, and a piece that only decorates the space risks becoming furniture. Tzanakou’s answer was to describe what she wanted as architecture responsive artworks, work built specifically to engage with 100 Bishopsgate’s materiality and the rhythm of the people who pass through it, and Beveridge’s three sculptures were selected from forty submissions specifically because they did that.

A brief built around a poem, not a mood board

The open call did not ask artists to submit a proposal for a lobby. It asked forty female artists and curators to respond to George Oppen’s poem Of Being Numerous, a meditation on urban life and the specific tension between solitude and community that defines a city built at density. It is an unusual brief for a commercial building, more suited to a gallery’s thematic group show than a standard public art open call, and it produced a shortlist judged by a panel of five: Deborah Smith, curator and founder of Deborah Smith Projects; Jo Baring, director of the Ingram Collection; the artist Rana Begum; Sigrid Kirk, co-founder of AWITA; and Saff Williams, curatorial director at Brookfield Properties Europe.

Three shortlisted artists who did not win the commission, Helen Barff, Helena Pritchard and Alice Sheppard, had their proposals shown separately at 30 Fenchurch Street as part of an exhibition called Inside the Studio: How Artists Make Work, giving the unsuccessful submissions a public life of their own rather than letting them disappear after judging. That is a small detail, but it is the kind of decision that tells you a programme has been built by people who understand how competitive open calls usually treat the artists who do not win.

AWITA itself was co-founded in 2016 by Sigrid Kirk as a professional network for women building careers in the visual arts, built around mentoring, career development and, increasingly, partnerships that put members’ work in front of audiences who would not otherwise encounter it. A rolling collaboration with JW Anderson’s Soho flagship, showing work by women artists inside a working retail space, follows the same logic as the 100 Bishopsgate commission: rather than campaigning for change in the abstract, AWITA has built a track record of placing specific artists inside specific commercial spaces with genuine footfall, then measuring the result by who actually got the commission.

The sculptor whose whole practice is about how things get displayed

Gabriele Beveridge was born in Hong Kong in 1985 and has built her career in London over roughly fifteen years, working with hand-blown glass, chrome and steel shop fittings, and imagery salvaged from beauty salons and other sites of commerce. Her practice has consistently returned to the same question: how display itself, the fixtures, the fittings, the surfaces something is presented on, shapes how a body or an object gets read. Solo and group shows including Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen in London, Great Pretender at Kai Art Center in Tallinn, and Gold Diamond Park at Elizabeth Dee in New York have built a body of work around commercial display structures repurposed as sculpture, chrome rails and salon fittings holding glass forms that behave like bodies rather than products.

That background is precisely why Tzanakou’s brief suited her. A commission built around a corporate lobby, itself a site of display, of bodies moving past surfaces designed to be looked at without quite being seen, sits directly inside the territory Beveridge had already spent a career working through. She was not adapting an unfamiliar practice to fit a corporate site. She was bringing a corporate site’s own logic, display, circulation, surface, into a body of work built to interrogate exactly that.

Her exhibition history bears out how consistently she has returned to that territory. Live Dead World, shown at Seventeen across 2018 and 2019, and Soft Shrinking Tremor at Parisian Laundry in Montreal in 2017, both worked the same seam of glass, chrome shop fittings and salvaged salon imagery that reappears at 100 Bishopsgate, and her presentation at LISTE Art Fair Basel in 2022 put that same vocabulary in front of an international collecting audience. Work of hers sits in the Contemporary Art Society’s collection, and her exhibitions have been written about in Art Forum and The White Review, which is to say the 100 Bishopsgate commission did not introduce an emerging artist to a technique. It gave an artist with roughly fifteen years of a consistent, specific practice a new kind of site, a functioning office tower rather than a gallery, to apply it to.

Three works, one argument about structure and organic form

NEST (II) is a 2.2 metre cubic glass structure containing eight hand-blown glass vessels shaped like human organs, a form small enough to read as intimate and large enough to function as its own miniature architecture inside the lobby’s much larger one. BODIES (I, II) are two freestanding hand-blown glass sculptures, the taller reaching two metres, mounted on commercial display structures of the kind found in shop fitting, their forms swelling and merging as though caught mid transformation rather than settled into a final shape. CORDS (VI, VII, VIII, IX) groups four tri-coloured hand-blown glass sculptures, each around eighty by thirty by twenty centimetres, arranged on a mirrored plinth, a seriality that asks how much individuality survives inside a set of nearly identical objects, the exact tension Oppen’s poem is built around.

Across all three works, Beveridge juxtaposes industrially manufactured glass panels with hand-blown elements, structured, machine-precise surfaces set directly against organic, irregular ones. That contrast is not incidental to the building it sits inside. 100 Bishopsgate, designed by Allies and Morrison in partnership with Arney Fender Katsalidis and completed in 2019, rises 172 metres across a 40 storey tower paired with a lower, seven storey building holding restaurant and office space, the two structures set around a new public plaza cut into the centre of the site. Its own form was designed to resolve a genuinely difficult site: the lower podium floors are shaped as parallelograms to fit the awkward geometry of the surrounding streets, while the tower above rises as clean rectangles once it clears the site’s constraints. The building itself is an exercise in reconciling irregular, site-driven form with regular, engineered form, which is precisely the argument Beveridge’s sculptures are making in miniature, industrial glass against hand-blown glass, structure against organic shape, resolved into a single object rather than left to compete. A lobby commission that echoes its own building’s structural logic this closely is not common, and it is unlikely to be something a passing visitor clocks consciously, which makes it worth naming.

What the statistic is actually asking a building like this to do

The open call that produced Glassed In Dreams exists because of a specific, published number: according to an ArtUK report, women have created only 13 per cent of London’s public sculptures where the artist’s name is known, against 85 per cent by men, with the remaining 2 per cent made jointly. A commercial tower committing its own lobby, for a full year, to a woman-led commission process judged by a panel of women, is one direct way a building with genuine daily footfall can shift that number rather than simply note it. Beveridge herself has described the constant flow of people through 100 Bishopsgate as something closer to a functioning organism than a conventional exhibition space, a comparison that captures why a commission like this carries a different kind of weight than the same sculptures would in a gallery that visitors choose to enter. Nobody chooses to walk through a City tower’s lobby for the art. They walk through it anyway, which is exactly the audience a statistic like 13 per cent needs reaching.

The commission’s launch, timed to open around International Women’s Day in March 2025, made that connection explicit without turning the work itself into a campaign object. The sculptures were never labelled as advocacy, and nothing in NEST (II), BODIES (I, II) or CORDS (VI, VII, VIII, IX) reads as illustrative of the statistic behind the open call. That separation matters. A commission that let its cause dictate its content would have produced weaker sculpture and a less convincing case for why the model should continue. Letting Beveridge make the work she would have made anyway, and building the access around her rather than the other way round, is the harder and more durable version of the same argument.

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Final thoughts

Glassed In Dreams closed in February 2026, and 100 Bishopsgate’s lobby has already moved on to a new commission, which is exactly the point. A one-off installation makes a single argument and then disappears. An annual open call, judged by a rotating panel and built around a genuine statistic about who gets to make public sculpture, keeps making the argument every year with a different artist and a different set of ideas. Gabriele Beveridge’s contribution to that sequence was a set of sculptures that took the building’s own structural logic, industrial precision resolving into organic form, and restated it in glass, at a scale a commuter walking through on the way to a lift might register without ever consciously noticing why the work felt like it belonged there rather than simply occupying space. That is a harder thing to achieve than filling a lobby with something decorative, and it is the reason a commission built around a poem about individuality inside a crowd ended up saying something specific about the particular tower it was standing in.