Staple City

Gleaming silver skyscrapers dominate the skyline of this city – but this impressive metropolis is made of tiny stacks of staples. Artist Peter Root created his urban sprawl by carefully placing 100,000 pieces of the tiny office stationery in building-like stacks.

Called Ephemicropolis, it took him 40 hours to make the 20ft by 10ft work on the floor of Northern Trust atrium in Guernsey.

The part-time lecturer broke the stacks into sizes varying from full stacks of about five inches high down to single staples. And, unsurprisingly, having a steady hand was important.’As the stacks are free-standing and very close together, the obvious challenge was not to knock them over,’ says Peter.

‘To build the more dense sections of the work took several hours and, on a couple of occasions, gravity demonstrated its severe lack of sympathy by undoing this work in milliseconds.’

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