Where Did Pink Floyd’s Giant Heads Go? The Story of Two Sculptures That Became Immortal — and Then Disappeared

In 1994, another image joined this extraordinary collection. Two enormous metal heads stood facing one another in an open field in Cambridgeshire, England. Their cold, almost robotic faces appeared to be engaged in a conversation the viewer could never hear. Between them, Ely Cathedral rose in the distance. The sky was dramatic, the landscape desolate, and the expressions of the two faces almost disturbingly empty. The cover of The Division Bell had been born.

The image is sometimes associated with PULSE, Pink Floyd's 1995 live album, since both records belong to the same period in the band's history. But it is The Division Bell that features the famous metal heads. And contrary to what many might assume, the photograph was not the product of digital manipulation. The heads were real. They had been manufactured, transported, and erected in an English agricultural field for the specific purpose of creating a photograph. Today, when an equivalent image can be generated in seconds using artificial intelligence, it is almost difficult to imagine the scale of the undertaking.

The man behind the concept was Storm Thorgerson, the British designer who helped define Pink Floyd's visual identity over several decades. His underlying philosophy was as simple as it was demanding: if an image could be created in the real world, why settle for simulating it? A strange object placed in an actual landscape and photographed under natural lighting conditions could possess a presence that even sophisticated image manipulation struggled to reproduce. It was not merely about technical perfection, but about photography's ability to document something that had genuinely happened, however improbable the subject might appear.

The metal-head concept was developed with artist Keith Breeden, while John Robertson was responsible for construction. London's Victoria and Albert Museum also identifies sculptor Aden Hynes among those involved in creating the sculptures. The heads incorporated sheet metal, timber structures, and lighter construction materials. They were not solid metal giants, although that was certainly how they appeared. The result was a pair of monumental faces, roughly comparable in height to a double-decker bus. What began as a commercial album production had suddenly become an ambitious project involving sculpture, engineering, and construction.

There was something almost old-fashioned and romantic about the entire enterprise. An internationally successful rock band needed an album cover. Rather than commissioning an illustration, its creative team built enormous heads and placed them in the countryside, where wind, weather, and natural light became elements of the final composition. That says something about Pink Floyd's status at the time, but perhaps even more about the artistic freedom that could exist around a major musical release. Album artwork was regarded as an integral part of the creative work, not an afterthought delegated to a marketing department.

Two Faces, a Third Face, and a Conversation That Never Happens

The real genius of the cover, however, does not lie in the size of the sculptures. It lies in the way the viewer perceives them. At first glance, we see two heads facing one another. But continue studying the photograph and another face begins to emerge. The visible eyes of the two sculptures become the eyes of a larger, composite face looking directly at us. Meanwhile, the space between their open mouths creates another form, an absence that becomes almost as significant as the physical structures surrounding it. The third face does not exist as an object. It is created in the mind of the observer.

This was no accident. Thorgerson deliberately constructed the composition to produce this double perception. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the sculptures also drew inspiration from the monumental figures of Easter Island. The museum further describes how the cover connects with the album's central theme: communication. Between the two mouths, four small lights suggest speech, or perhaps the attempt to speak. It is a simple visual detail, but one loaded with symbolic meaning.

The Division Bell appeared at a time when Pink Floyd had long since moved beyond its original line-up. Roger Waters had left the band during the 1980s, and relationships between its members had been marked by conflicts and legal disputes. David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason continued under the Pink Floyd name. The album explores misunderstanding, distance, lost relationships, and humanity's sometimes almost hopeless difficulty in communicating. It is difficult to look at the two faces without thinking about precisely that. They stand close together, yet appear completely isolated. Their mouths are open, but their expressions reveal no warmth. They look towards one another without allowing us to determine whether they actually see each other.

Naturally, the band's own history can be read into the image. Two opposing wills. A conversation that has ended, or perhaps never functioned properly in the first place. A third, invisible face that might represent an absent participant. Thorgerson himself associated the third face with Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's original frontman, whose absence continued to shape the band's history long after his departure. That gives the photograph another dimension. Someone is missing, yet the absence remains present. It is an idea that runs through much of Pink Floyd's music.

And in the middle of this composition stands Ely Cathedral, a medieval building whose construction began centuries before anyone could have imagined rock music, electric guitars, or a global recording industry. The cathedral becomes a historical anchor. Two almost futuristic metal faces stand before a symbol of human faith, civilisation, and enduring craftsmanship. The modern encounters the medieval. The artificial meets the landscape. Technology confronts history. These layers of interpretation help explain why the image still feels relevant more than thirty years later.

It is also worth considering how differently this might have unfolded today. An AI-generated image could probably produce an almost identical visual result, perhaps even a technically more polished one. But knowing that these heads were physically constructed and erected in a field changes our relationship with the photograph. The absurd becomes infinitely more fascinating when we know that people actually went to the trouble of making it happen.

From an English Field to an American Rock Museum

But what happened next? Once the photography was completed, two gigantic sculptures remained, having fulfilled their original purpose. They had become an album cover. There was no obvious reason to leave them standing on agricultural land outside Ely. The heads had also been designed for a particular production, rather than as permanent public artworks. They were therefore dismantled and removed. The field, the landscape, and the medieval cathedral on the horizon remained.

The sculptures' history, however, did not end there. By 2001, the metal heads were at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. They had travelled from the English countryside to one of rock history's best-known museums. A 2015 article in Louder describes how transporting them required special planning, and how the museum's doors had to be dismantled to accommodate the enormous objects. The heads were then lifted to the museum's third floor. What had originally been temporary photographic scenery had become a museum exhibit.

In 2017, the sculptures travelled to London in connection with the major exhibition Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was an extensive presentation of the band's musical, visual, and technological history. Objects once regarded as stage scenery, album-cover props, and components of concert productions acquired a new role as artefacts of cultural history. The metal heads belonged naturally in that environment. They represented not just one album but an era when rock music could bring together industrial construction, architecture, photography, and artistic experimentation.

But this is where the story becomes less clear. The exhibition continued in various forms and locations, yet the publicly available documentation does not provide an unambiguous answer as to where the original metal sculptures are stored in October 2026. That does not mean they have been lost or destroyed. It means that their present location cannot be established with sufficient confidence from the available sources.

The story is complicated further by the fact that the metal heads were not the only sculptures created. Two additional giant heads were produced by Aden Hynes, this time with a completely different, stone-like appearance. These were used, among other things, on the cassette version of The Division Bell and in touring material. There are also reports of later replicas of the metal heads, including examples displayed on a record company building in London. Consequently, seeing two Pink Floyd heads in a museum or on a rooftop does not necessarily mean that they are the original sculptures photographed in 1994.

When a Work of Art Outlives Its Physical Existence

The extraordinary thing about this entire story is that millions of people recognise the two heads, yet remarkably few can say where the originals are today. An object can apparently be world-famous as an image while remaining almost anonymous as a physical artefact. There is something paradoxical about that. We can identify the sculptures instantly, but their material history is considerably less familiar than the photograph that made them famous.

Anyone visiting the location outside Ely today will find no gigantic metal faces awaiting them. The landscape remains recognisable, and the cathedral stands as it has for centuries. Music enthusiasts have travelled to the area, including Quanea Drove, attempting to recreate the photograph's perspective and find the place where it all began. It is almost a form of modern pilgrimage. They are not searching for a monument that still exists on the site, but for the precise point where a temporary artistic construction was transformed into something enduring.

Perhaps that is what makes the story so fascinating. Pink Floyd's two metal heads were created for a single moment that would be captured by a camera. They never really needed to exist beyond that moment. Yet they survived their original purpose, crossed the Atlantic, and became part of international music history.

In our digital age, the question becomes almost philosophical. What actually makes a work of art real? Is it the object itself, the image of the object, or the emotions and associations that the image creates? If the original heads were discovered in a storage facility somewhere, they would undoubtedly attract considerable interest among Pink Floyd enthusiasts. But the significance of the album cover would hardly change. It already lives independently of whatever has happened to the metal, timber, and rivets.

At the same time, there is something valuable about preserving physical history. These sculptures represent a period when a creative idea could develop into a completely unreasonable practical project without someone first demanding to know how many clicks, impressions, or conversions the result would generate. Two enormous heads were built in the middle of a field because it was the most convincing way to express an idea. Not the easiest. Not the cheapest. But perhaps the most powerful.

Anyone familiar with Pink Floyd's music knows that much of its strength emerges from precisely such encounters between technological sophistication and the inexplicable complexities of being human. The band could employ enormous resources to express something as fragile as loneliness, loss, and the longing for communication. The cover of The Division Bell is an unusually clear example of that contradiction.

Two gigantic faces stand opposite one another. Their mouths are open. Between them lies an empty space. And perhaps the most important element of the photograph is not the sculptures themselves, but that very emptiness — the place where a conversation ought to take place.

More than thirty years later, we still do not have a definitive answer about the whereabouts of the originals. But the question remains, just as the image does.

Perhaps that is also the most appropriate ending to the story of an album about humanity's difficulty in reaching one another. Two heads were built to represent communication. Now we are the ones trying to make them speak.

Sources and Further Reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum – The Graphic Identity of Pink Floyd — The artistic direction, symbolism, and creative design behind Pink Floyd's visual identity.

• Louder – Pink Floyd's Stretham Bigheads — The sculptures' construction, transportation, and museum history.

• The Vinyl Historian – The Division Bell Album Cover Location — A documented visit to the original photography location near Ely.

• The Making of The Division Bell Album Cover — Background information about the album artwork and its different sculptural versions.

Historical feature, October 2026. The precise current location of the original metal sculptures remains unverified.