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A new art installation at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park will certainly get people talking - and divide opinion,

The huge installation has sent visitors into a whirl since short-listed Turner Prize artist, Fiona Banner, took over the entire Longside Gallery.

Entitled Chinook, the work features two pairs of disembodied giant copter blades hung from the ceiling, which rotate in opposition to one another at various speeds and overlap to give the unnerving illusion that they are about to collide.

They are flanked by a floor to ceiling word mural that mimics the sound of the vehicle in action, repeating the letters “wp” countless times.

The artist says her piece represents the culmination of a fascination with the machine, which she calls an ‘engineering phenomenon’, that has spanned 17 years.

Artist Fiona Banner at the opening of her exhibition 'WpWpWp' at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Bretton
Artist Fiona Banner at the opening of her exhibition 'WpWpWp' at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Bretton

“It is visually a contradiction; it looks clumsy and prehistoric, and yet is able to perform the most extraordinary aerodynamic function.

“When in motion the rotor blades at the front and back of the aircraft appear to collide and pull the vast craft in opposite directions.

“ It’s like it’s acting out the dilemma and contradiction of our relationship with the military and its hardware.”

Banner finds the military aircraft, which is iconically linked to the Vietnam War despite still being in use today, at once beautiful, horrifying and almost ‘prehistoric, from a time before words’.

Her 1997 work, THE NAM, represented her first foray into the construct, which consisted of 1,000 pages of writing that described six Hollywood Vietnam movies.

Her Chinook exhibition will remain at the sculpture park until January 4 2015.

See more pictures from the exhibition plus other unusual exhibits at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in our picture gallery below.