Event

One Million Handshakes Through The Fence
Crewe Railway Station, Crewe
10 June 2016

Detail from One Million Handshakes Through The Fence by Mark Sheeky Detail from One Million Handshakes Through The Fence by Mark Sheeky Detail from One Million Handshakes Through The Fence by Mark Sheeky Detail from One Million Handshakes Through The Fence by Mark Sheeky

About this event
One Million Handshakes Through The Fence is an art installation conceived as a reflection on the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Here, the ninety year story is told not in years, but in people, the thousands, tens of thousands of ordinary people that her majesty has met. Each meeting is so special to the person meeting the queen, often a once-in-a-lifetime memory, yet to her majesty this is a matter of routine, part of a job that requires endless social connections, connections that require friendliness, yet must always have barriers within; an essential distance between an ordinary person, and a head of state.

The installation explores the stream of people met over the years, a rotating conveyor-belt of people to meet. A loose fence acts like a barrier between the observer and the observed, reflecting the emotional barriers within each royal encounter. Regular tones chime out like a great clock of the centuries, like a stream, a river of time, each note played like a person floating from present to past, and into distant memory.

This one-day art installation was a collaboration between Mark Sheeky and Sabine Kussmaul, made for Virgin Trains, as part of a day of the Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday celebrations.