News

Manchester-based The Image Group has taken on its most demanding job to date, installing a 3,500sqm vinyl print at the Chill Factore, a snow-based indoor amusement park next to the Trafford Centre.

The 12-week installation will be on view from November, as a backdrop for Europe's longest and widest real snow indoor ski slope – the centrepiece of the 23,225sqm venue.

The 35-strong large-format digital print specialist used six abseilers on 61m of rope plus two cherry pickers to create the installation, the largest in the company's history.

The Image Group sales director Rick Jervis said the project presented enormous logistical problems.

"We were given a blank canvas by Chill Factore and asked to recreate an alpine scene," Jervis said. "It's been our biggest challenge yet, requiring the largest vinyl print we've ever completed, but printing the artwork was just the beginning."

He added: "We knew this was never going to be a straightforward installation. We couldn't drill into the walls because the finished environment needs to be temperature controlled. And we couldn't use scaffolding because of the weight, cost and time."

Jervis said the cherry pickers worked well for the first six weeks of the installation, but were too heavy to use once the tin floor was laid, as it contained glycol pipes to create the alpine temperatures.

"That's when we called in the crack abseiling team using can-span machinery to control ascent and descent. There was no room for error. We needed to line up each image perfectly on the overlap or the effect would have been ruined. We often relayed two or three times to ensure a perfect match."