Zobop Possibly 1999

Zobop is the collective title of an ongoing series of psychedelic floor designs by the Scottish artist Jim Lambie. Instances of the work typically consist of seven, eight or nine bright colours of vinyl tape applied to the floor in concentric lines that conform to the pre-existing architectural layout of the spaces in which Zobop is installed. Lambie has also created versions of the work entirely from black and white tape and from metallic spectra of golds, silvers and bronzes. He begins installing instances of Zobop by applying a strip of tape along the baseboard of a room or corridor (or at the joint where the wall meets the floor), until he has outlined the entire space with a single colour of a consistent width, which varies across installations from a couple of millimetres to a few centimetres. Next to this first strip of tape Lambie then adds another strip of a different colour that overlaps the preceding strip by precisely 2 mm, until he has made another outline of the room. Lambie then repeats this process of creating perimeters among perimeters until he has filled the entire square-footage of the floor plan in which he is working. The result is a design consisting of successively smaller circumferences of vinyl tape that is dominated by parallel lines of vibrant colour. Lambie has said that the pattern of colours in any given manifestation of Zobop is applied randomly, and this, coupled with the fact that the work is site-specific, means that each iteration is unique.