For its second major exhibition, Towner, the new contemporary art museum, has commissioned Jodie Carey to produce the most ambitious work of her career thus far.  Sussex-born artist Carey has created three immense chandeliers, constructed from 9,000 plaster cast human bones, in a large-scale installation that will engulf Towner’s 400m ² Exhibition Gallery.  The exhibition, entitled In the Eyes of Others , opens to the public on 11 July 2009 .

The three chandeliers, each weighing a tonne, will loom imposingly in the vast darkened space.  Viewers will wend their way through a shadowy landscape of highly stacked boxes and newspapers, before discovering the spot-lit chandeliers in a sudden clearing.  Shrouded in darkness, with the air purposefully chilled, visitors will find themselves physically enveloped by an atmosphere of silence and foreboding.

In the Eyes of Others will be Jodie’s first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery.  It builds on a previous untitled work in which she laboriously constructed ornate chandeliers from vacuum cleaner dust. Jodie’s work focuses on traditions of ritual, artifice and mortality in contemporary western society.  Transforming the space, her large-scale sculptures and installations often seek to overwhelm the visitor and juxtapose monumental scale with the intimacy and intensity of her obsessive craftsmanship.