Fireblade suspended in Oxford St store

Added on Monday, July 12th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor | One Comment

Honda’s Fireblade can be seen like never before after going on show in a unique window display at Selfridges’ flagship Oxford Road store.

The artist inspired window display features a black and white Honda Fireblade suspended from one side of a set of scales, with a fully disassembled Fireblade balancing these out with its hundreds of parts hanging individually on wires of varying lengths.

The display occupies the prestigious double aspect Wonder Room feature windows, on the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street, and is the focal point of a wider five window artistic display by up and coming young artist, Kyle Bean. The display theme is ‘The Conservation of Mass’, with the displays cleverly and innovatively highlighting how matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

This truly eye-catching and inspiring display certainly turned heads and attracted crowds outside the windows as the team undertook a daytime ‘live installation’, as the Selfridges windows are viewed by over 125,000 different people each day.

The artist won a competitive pitch process for the window display at Selfridges, which has recently been voted the world’s best department store and attracts over 20 million visitors each year. Kyle’s vision for the largest of his five window display was for an object that was minimalistic but had bold presence, would create intrigue by being in an environment out of its context, as well as being something that in its own form was stylish and compact, yet made up of an intricate connection of many parts – and a motorcycle was his obvious choice.

“A motorbike ticked all the boxes for what I wanted to achieve for the largest of the five window displays,” said Kyle. “The Fireblade is such an iconic machine worldwide, with Honda also being renowned for their innovation, so this machine and working with Honda was the only way I really wanted to go. Seeing the whole installation now in the windows is a dream come true and it’s inspiring to see what was in my head as an original idea, now actually be a reality and inspiring others who see it.”

The Fireblade display can be seen in the Selfridges windows until the end of August. If you can’t make it down to London, watch the display being constructed in the video below.