CJ Lim creates a wonderland at the V&A

Bartlett professor CJ Lim has just spent four days rolling up t-shirts into tight bundles. He’s not working for Benetton. Instead, this labour of love – each has to be identically rolled to make white “rosettes” – has resulted in Seasons Through the Looking Glass, a new installation at the V&A’s Tunnel entrance inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Lim has been fascinated by Carroll’s spatial fantasy world ever since he read the books when he was 12. The V&A commission is his first built project inspired by them, and will be in place for a year, enticing visitors in from the underground walkway that links the South Kensington museums.

His starting point was the part in Alice in Wonderland where she finds three gardeners painting white roses red. This gave him the idea of creating a rose topiary in the lobby space that reaches up towards the ceiling strip lighting. Unable to use real plants or attach anything to the fabric of the listed building, Lim set himself the challenge of creating a metaphoric, subterranean rose garden that would change with the seasons.

“I like the basis of taking something quite ancient and historical – from 1865 when the book was written – and bringing it into a contemporary context,” says Lim, whose previous narrative work includes an installation on Marco Polo and Kublai Khan at the Venice Biennale.

He came up with a structure of honeycomb recycled cardboard to represent the trunk and twigs. Next came the white t-shirts, more than 1,000 of them, rolled into rosettes and inserted between the cardboard uprights to represent the roses. Each has to be folded just so – if they’re too small they’ll fall through the gap, but too big and they won’t fit in. After plenty of trial and error, Barry Cho from Lim’s practice Studio 8 Architects perfected the optimum technique of exactly four rolls to create the rosette.

“If ever something was hand-made, it’s this installation,” says Lim, shortly after creating the last few roses to complete the design.

The finishing touches were rose oil to create a sensory experience of a flowering garden out of the cardboard and cotton plus a soundtrack of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Materials were restricted due to the V&A’s conservation policies – even the 100% recycled cotton t-shirts had to be specially washed and sprayed.

The effect of this strange topiary is amplified by a distorted mirror on the wall of the tunnel outside the entrance – the looking glass, says Lim, that reflects the structure to infinity.

Lim was keen to avoid a static installation and has plans to change it throughout its time at the museum. In a few months time he’ll splash the structure with red emulsion in reference to the gardeners in the story, and later on in the year the t-shirts will be replaced by scarves to suggest winter.

Lim worked on the project with structural engineer Techniker, and is enthusiastic about the collaboration with museum’s curators Abraham Thomas, Laurie Britton Newell and project manager Kaia Charles.

He’s confident the structure will be robust enough to survive a year of curious visitors, but has prudently put some spare t-shirts aside in case any roses go astray. Just don’t ask him to roll them up.

Seasons Through the Looking Glass by CJ Lim and Studio 8 Architects
until March 29, 2009
V&A, Cromwell Road
London SW7