Yes…this is 700 actual, real-life beds…on a beach…in Devon (none of that Photoshop business). Created by Storm Thorgerson for the cover of Pink Floyd’s album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the creation of such a mammoth design was inspired by one Floyd’s lyrics, as Storm elaborates…
“The design for the large array of beds on a beach comes from a line in one of the songs ‘Yet Another Movie’ from the album . ‘Visions of an empty bed’ - wherein I reversed the single and plural becoming a ‘vision of empty beds’. These beds are real wrought iron Victorian hospital beds each weighed an effing ton. They are laid out in the vague shape of a riverbed, ho ho, and what you see is what you get - approx 700 hundred beds on a seashore. It took 30 people, 2 tractors,and 3 flatbeds all day to arrange them, then it rained and we had to come back two weeks later and do it all again… i make that two lapses of reason. When we’d completed the shot which was used on the cover we turned away to congratulate each other, turned back and all the beds were under water,as the tide had turned rather more quickly than we had envisaged… wet dream or what?”
Storm Thorgerson: Right But Wrong begins April 2nd with us here @ Idea Generation Gallery, London
