Glass artist Alexander Beleschenko has turned a featureless underground passage into a festival of light and colour
A featureless subterranean passage at London's Canary Wharf has been transformed into a work of art by glass artist Alexander Beleschenko.

The passage, connecting the Jubilee Line station and Canada Place shopping mall to the new Citigroup tower, has been clad in a grid of white-glass panels, hand-painted with what the West Midlands-born artist describes as "rhythmic passages of shapes and tonalities of colour". The colours used – blue, yellow and green – represent air, water and earth.

Computer-controlled lighting installed behind the panels varies the intensity of light passing through the panels, sending waves of shadow along the walls to create the impression of clouds across the sky.

The basement passage, commissioned as part of Canary Wharf's public art programme, is one of two works by Beleschenko in the Cesar Pelli-designed building. The other, in a ground-floor passage between the Pelli tower and Foster & Partners' neighbouring tower for HSBC, comprises more than 12,000 segments of antique glass, bonded with cold-poured resin to create a geometric pattern in hues of yellow, blue, purple and orange.

Beleschenko has worked alongside contemporary architects before; he created the dramatic 40 ft high blue glass cone inside MacCormac Jamieson Prichard's Southwark station on the Jubilee Line. He also produced installations for the same architects' Ruskin Library at Lancaster University.

Credits

Glass installer Pollards Eyrespan Lighting design DPA Lighting Consultants Architect Cesar Pelli Contractor Canary Wharf Contractors