Luke Jerram

Luke Jerram (born 1974) is a British installation artist. He creates sculptures, large artwork installations, and live arts projects.

Artwork Jerram's work has been featured in over 900 exhibitions and is in over 50 permanent collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Wellcome Collection in London.

In 2002, he created Tide, an artwork consisting of acoustic sculptures demonstrating 'live' representation of how the moon's gravity affects the Earth, where gravitational information was translated into sound.

In 2004, he began creating a series of transparent and colourless large glass sculptures of viruses and other pathogens, titled Glass Microbiology, recreating viruses such as smallpox, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, hand, foot and mouth disease and swine influenza.

Aeolus acoustic wind pavilion at Canary Wharf, London in March 2012. In 2012, he presented Aeolus, an acoustic wind pavilion at Canary Wharf in London. Named after the Aeolian harp, it was designed to create music without the need of human or electrical power.

In 2013, he created Maya, a sculpture of a girl created using 5,000+ photographs of his daughter, installed at platform three of Temple Meads railway station, which seemed fragmented until the viewer was far enough away for the image to be unpixellated.

In 2015, he created Withdrawn, which placed a fleet of stranded fishing boats strategically located around Leigh Woods National Nature Reserve. The artwork was supported by the National Trust and the Forestry Commission.

In 2019 he set up and funded both the Dreamtime Fellowship to support recent art graduates in his home city of Bristol and the Bristol Schools Arts Fund to support secondary schools impacted by austerity. In 2024 he set up the Jerram Foundation to help deliver some of these charitable projects.

In 2020 he was given an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bristol, made an Honorary Academician of the RWA and Fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society.

His newest artwork, Helios, is seven metres across and named after a Greek god. Each centimetre of the enormous spherical sculpture, which is lit from inside, is said to represent 2,000 kilometres of the Sun’s surface.It fuses solar imagery, sunlight and a new composition by sound artist Duncan Speakman and musician Sarah Anderson which includes NASA recordings of the Sun.

Personal life

He is a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol.

Jerram has dichromatic colourblindness, which he views as a gift. He lives in Bristol, England with his wife and two children.

Selected works Withdrawn consisting of boats stranded high above Avon Gorge in Leigh Woods, 2015.

Tide (2002): Acoustic sculptures demonstrating ‘live’ the impact of the moon's gravity. 2001 ACE Arts Council Touring Grant for Tide 2011 Fellowship at Museum of Glass, Washington 2013 Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. Play Me, I’m Yours ‘Best Public Art’ 2017 Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence Grant at University of Bristol, UK. 2018 Visiting Fellow Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences, University of West of England 2022 Hearts for the Arts Award, for Of Earth and Sky. 2024 Oxford University, ImmersiGenius Distinction Award.