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Luke Hart will meet me at Gate 7 I get the text on the DLR, heading east past Canary Wharf through the dusty warmth of a London summer The train approaches Silvertown, a tapestry of brownfield plots, derelict factories, foul-smelling chemical plants, low-rise terraces, gated estates, arterial roads, dead ends, trash heaps, show homes, cracked concrete and prolific weeds We arrive at Pontoon Dock, where I am the only person who disembarks This, in my experience, is typical of the area: you often feel as if you’ve entered an evacuated part of town     I’ve come to Silvertown to visit the artist Luke Hart, who is constructing a new temporary outdoor sculpture on the quayside of Victoria Dock Hart and I were both students at the Royal College of Art ­– same year; different courses – although we never actually met For his degree show in 2013 Hart showed ‘Fractal Weave Structure I’, a tall, three-legged sculpture built from segments of steel tube, each tube connected to the other by a tangled joint made from polyurethane   Proving Ground: Trailer from Luke Hart on Vimeo   In terms of its size and the arachnid connotations of its articulated legs, the piece bore a loose resemblance to ‘Maman’, the 30-foot-tall spider by Louise Bourgeois first shown in Tate Modern in 2000 Bourgeois described the bronze, marble and welded-steel sculpture as ‘an ode to my mother’, who died when Bourgeois was 21, but the title of the work – a cosy French nickname similar to ‘mummy’, ‘mama’ or ‘mum’ – is very nearly a homonym of ‘mammon’: a word translating variously as ‘riches’, ‘greed’ or ‘material wealth’ Whether or not you find this double entendre significant will depend upon how cynical you are about the effects of corporate sponsorship on artistic production – ‘Maman’ was funded by Unilever   The resemblance of one large and more or less spidery sculpture to another is, on one level, a mere coincidence But the comparison of Hart to Bourgeois’ work, ‘Fractal Weave’ to ‘Maman’, reveals how the relationship