For a week in September 2018, walkers on the South Bank in London found themselves faced with a 9m-high human profile in wood, gazing across the Thames from a pier opposite Gabriel’s Wharf. With the distant feel of one of Naum Gabo’s early constructivist pieces, this was Head Above Water, the work of the designer and sculptor Steuart Padwick, who has died of stomach cancer aged 63.
The sculpture was arresting by day, and more so by night. Passersby could message the head from their mobile phones, alerting it to their feelings. Head Above Water would light up accordingly, its palette changing with the dominant temper of the texts it received: blue for melancholy, green for calm and so on. It thus became, briefly, an emotional thermometer for London, a measure of the capital’s mood. “You can play with it – hashtag happy, hashtag sad – and change the colours in real time,” Padwick explained in a video on the work’s website. “And that’s kind of fun. But it also makes you realise that you can change your emotions.”
