More about this artwork:

This sculpture depicts Alison Lapper pregnant and is an inflatable version of the marble sculpture ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ that was placed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Quinn was asked to make the sculpture for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The work, which uses double-layer polyester and high-capacity air pumps, was born from necessity was created from a practical point of view since it needed to be at least 12m high to be visible in the Olympic Stadium and needed to appear very quickly, within a matter of seconds. Quinn engaged the latest technology to produce it whereby the form of the original marble sculpture is scanned and its surface photographed for colour and texture in order to create a digital 3D version, which is then cut out into precise pieces of cloth and sewn together. Sceptical at first, Quinn soon realised that the work articulated some of his core ideas, in particular, the difference between an object with mass and gravity, and its image or presence in mass culture. He sees the work as a cultural hallucination or a “cultural image of the sculpture literalised as an inflatable.”