FEATURED ARTICLE
FEATURED ARTICLE
Big, Yellow And Visible From Space?
Jul 16 2025
| Samuel Gosheron
| 2 MIN READ
Sand In Your Eye is based in Hebden Bridge but, when it comes to creative ideas and their execution you'd be forgiven for thinking it's from another world.
The company creates extraordinary art. Its works include sand sculptures embodying incredible detail and scale; sand drawings where contrasting textures resolve detail across a canvas as expansive as a beach and which are gently erased by incoming tides; it works with ice, pumpkins and eye-popping anamorphic renderings on paved surfaces too.
Thanks to an approach from Leeds Trinity Shopping Centre, Sand In Your Eye can add landmark scale vinyl iconography to its considerable repertoire. With a bit of help from a rope access team at PLA Window Cleaning, Sand In Your Eye created an installation to acknowledge the Tour de Yorkshire. It's a Big Yellow Bike. It's 31 metres long. It's made of about 100 parts, 34 in each wheel. And it's applied to the outside of the glazed roof of Leeds Trinity shopping centre whose panels range from horizontal tending to vertical in a faceted dome spanning the pedestrian space underneath.
The applied graphic is plainly visible from elevated positions with some speculating that might include space. From ground level the scale of the installation assumes an almost abstract form from some vantage points. With The Tour De Yorkshire in the front of everyone's mind though, there could be little doubt why the bike's there.
The installation was produced using Metamark M7 coloured self-adhesive vinyl which was supplied by Active Window Films. The shapes comprising the bike icon were cut by the team at Sand In Your Eye and then assembled, one component at a time by the PLA team, working at height. The works is of such a scale that a “step back†is needed to appreciate it. The PLA team wouldn't have appreciated the impact until returning to ground level.
Talk about having a great idea and shouting it from the rooftops.