Pro Vice-Chancellor,

 

On a cold January morning earlier this year I sat on the platform at Brighton Station waiting for a train when a rather dishevelled-looking man in a puffa jacket and baseball cap sauntered up to a battered old piano sitting on the station forecourt and started to play a wonderful, moving, and really quite unexpected, Beethoven piano sonata. People slowed and stopped to listen, smiles spread across faces, the mood was calmed and lifted, and a sense of community created. 

 

This moment was made possible by the imagination of Luke Jerram, a Bristol-based artist of global renown, and our honorary graduate today. His projects are diverse and hard to categorise, but always shaped by curiosity, delivered in collaboration, and underpinned by generosity.

 

Since 2008 his celebrated street pianos installation ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ has been presented in over 60 cities, including Bristol, and has been enjoyed by more than 10 million people worldwide. Launched by the French Minister of Culture in Paris and Mayor Bloomberg in NYC, the installation has received press coverage in almost every newspaper and television station around the globe. The project triggered a global movement of pianos being installed in public places across the world by organisations and individuals, for people to play. Intriguingly, the idea for ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ came from visiting his local launderette, where Luke saw the same people there each weekend and yet no-one talked to one another. Luke realised that there must be hundreds of these invisible communities, regularly spending time with one another in silence. Placing a piano into the space was a catalyst for conversation. Through the power of his imagination, Luke Jerram had started a phenomenon that has drawn people together in joyful and evocative shared experiences – creating fleeting communities in increasingly atomised public spaces.

 

If you were in Bristol in 2014, you will have witnessed another powerful example of Luke’s ability to transform what can happen in public space. A giant Park and Slide installation not far from this building  gave the people of Bristol the opportunity to slide head-first down Park Street, making the everyday feel magical, and encouraging us to take a fresh look at our urban environment, using play to allow us to imagine a new potential for our cities.  Park and Slide also made international headline news, creating 500 news stories reaching an estimated 1 billion people worldwide.  Following the success of this artwork, several commercial companies sprung up (not affiliated with Luke Jerram), installing temporary slides in cities of America, Europe and Australia. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have also been raised by charities touring their own urban slides across the UK.   

 

If you missed his Park and Slide down Park Street, perhaps you experienced Luke’s 2016 ‘Museum of the Moon’, an inflatable spherical replica of the Moon, recently touring India with the British Council, presented at the Commonwealth Games in Australia, exhibited in Aarhus, Denmark for the European Capital of Culture, and featuring on the last series of Strictly Come Dancing, floating above the dancers in the Blackpool Ballroom. Luke was inspired to create the Museum of Moon after observing the wide tidal range of the Avon here in Bristol. The first Museum of the Moon was made by Cameron Balloons and funded by the UK Space Agency, and decorated with imagery of the moon’s surface from NASA’s Luna Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Since 2016 the Museum of the Moon has been circling the globe and lighting up spaces from Bilbao to Beijing, including abbeys and swimming pools. The moon has always acted as a cultural mirror for our beliefs and ways of seeing.  So it is apt that, depending on where this artwork is presented, its meaning and interpretation shift: in this way the ‘Museum of the Moon’ allows us to observe and contemplate cultural similarities and differences around the world.  We were privileged to have the ‘Museum of the Moon’ here in the Great Hall during the installation of Sir Paul Nurse as our new Chancellor. For us, the Moon captured the values and ambitions of our great University, becoming a wonderful symbol of our commitment to foster creativity, to encourage meticulous use of scientific data, to create cross-cultural dialogues and to foster a sense of wonder.

 

‘Play me, I’m Yours’, ‘Park and Slide’ and ‘Museum of the Moon’ are just three of the many projects emanating from a spark of Luke’s imagination here in Bristol that have sent flashes of joy across the globe.  Other recent projects with the University have included his 2018 collaboration with the Bristol Vision Institute, which involved a nine-month residency at the Bristol Eye Hospital, where Luke deepened his knowledge of visual perception, resulting in the ‘Impossible Garden’ exhibition at the University Botanical Gardens; and Gaia, which was created in partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council, and which our Cabot Institute hosted here in the Great Hall last summer.

 

But Luke Jerram’s influence extends far beyond Bristol: his art installations tour art festivals and museums worldwide and he is known globally for his innovative arts practice and large-scale public artworks.  Many of his artworks are also now in permanent collections. His Glass Microbiology artworks that explore the edges of perception can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Shanghai Museum of Glass, Wellcome Collection (London) and Corning Museum of Glass (USA).  Indeed, in 2015 his sculptures were presented alongside the work of Leonardo da Vinci at the Artscience Museum, Singapore. Luke’s sculptures are also respected in the scientific community, with features in The Lancet, Scientific American, BMJ and on the front cover of Nature Magazine.

 

To achieve all this, Luke Jerram works closely with others: he builds and manages specialist teams of engineers, craftsmen and technicians to help him realise his works. These range from composers to glassblowers, medieval musicologists to hot air balloonists. In this way, he says “I’m only limited by my imagination in what can be produced. Anything is possible.”

 

As you leave us today to take the next step in your life journey, I hope that you will take inspiration from Luke Jerram: explore your dreams and retain your curiosity; embrace the risk of failure; create the space to re-examine the familiar and interrogate the known; respect local differences and celebrate the power of collaboration; in all things, display a generosity of spirit.

 

Pro Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Luke Alexander Jerram as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.