The artistry of the world’s top tennis players is something to behold and so, too, is the art inspired by their talents.
The shop windows of Wimbledon Village are chockablock with tribute art, extraordinarily imaginative displays wrought from tennis balls and rackets. None come bolder or more spectacular than ‘Rebound Symmetry’, a sculpture molded from 350 tennis balls which hangs above the Piazza in Wimbledon town centre – a thriving public space run by Love Wimbledon, who host 90 events a year from Big Screen tennis to cultural displays.
Henry Day, a graduate of Wimbledon College of Art, is responsible for the sculpture. Using 350 Slazenger balls he built an icosahedron (a geometric form with identical edges, faces and angles). Three mirrored 'tennis courts' have been intersected, and the corners have been joined by tennis balls to form the shape.
“I wanted to juxtapose the unpredictability and chaos of a tennis match to the inherent order and symmetry in my work,” he says. “I took it as a challenge to see if tennis courts and tennis balls could be arranged to fit in perfect symmetry.”
Day recalls that last year he saw numerous tennis balls strung up and integrated around the town to celebrate the Championships. “It was about the same time as my degree show. I had just finished using thousands of dice to make my final sculpture for my degree and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what I could do with a load of tennis balls?’ It was a very strange and exciting coincidence to have been approached by Love Wimbledon for this project.”
After an initial sketch, the design proved tricky, requiring months of planning. Once the design was finalised, the sculpture only took a matter of days to make by a professional team, in a fabrication workshop that specialises in bespoke designs.
The completed sculpture is 1.2 metres, weighs around 50kg, with each edge of the shape being 12 balls long. There are 350 tennis balls in the sculpture, weighing a total of 20kg. The size of the mirror ‘tennis courts’ are approximately 1:11 in size ratio compared to an actual tennis court. If the white lines were to scale, they would be less than 4mm thick and barely visible - the lines of the sculpture are approximately three times thicker.
Day’s artist statement suggests the ‘sport’ of tennis that we enjoy is a surface-level appreciation of the dynamics of the ball in motion. “Henry’s practice is driven by what we cannot comprehend,” it reads. “With interests in mathematics, geometry and natural philosophy, he is inspired by subjects that leave him perplexed. He has no intention of gaining a logical understanding, but feels that his work is successful when it encapsulates what our minds fail to encapsulate. The work then becomes more than itself - a paradoxical microcosm of philosophical loose ends.”
The original brief was to use tennis balls to create a vibrant eye-catching piece to draw people’s attention. “It was great to have the freedom to interpret so open a brief and have free rein to produce work that felt like my own,” says Day.
“Love Wimbledon have a great relationship with the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the tennis fortnight is the busiest of the year. The commission not only celebrates this, but has hopefully drawn in the masses seeing the tennis to check out the town centre and give the local businesses a boost.”
