KOCHI:
Your sculpture, ‘Here After Here After Here’ permanently installed in Austria is now visible via Google Earth. Can you say a few words about this sculpture? Its scale and concept.
‘Here After Here After Here’, unveiled in 2015, is 20 feet in height and spans about 60 feet across. Rendered in a ‘traffic blue’ shade, the sculpture could appear like a mammoth loop of infinitely-stretched traffic signage.
The works draws together a confluence of myriad references: the mythic symbol of uroboros, ancient eternal knots, alchemical diagrams, and sacred geometry.
The text and symbols connect Stockerau in Austria (where it is permanently installed) to places all over the world, ranging from Singapore to Salvador, Marrakesh, Beijing and Bukarest to New York, Paris and Taipei, amongst several others. They bear actual distances and exit signs that you might follow from Stockerau to reach any of these places.
Google Earth seems like an interesting point from where to view a work like this, since it probes the very scale of the planet. Interestingly, while conceiving the work in 2012 at one point I had hit a creative block, and all my on-site notes and reference photos made little sense to me.
Seated in my studio I would zoom in and out of the location in Austria via Google Earth to befriend the terrain. On one occasion I noticed the spheroid of the globe overlapped perfectly with the circle of the roundabout. This led ultimately to the conception of the piece.
It is remarkable that today the work can be seen through the same view-finder. Your work often always has a cosmological thread - how does it feel to view your creation via satellite imaging?
Google Earth is an interesting instrument. It’s like a self-gazing apparatus - us looking at ourselves - in a way that we are now left with no terra incognita. When a friend shared the Google Earth link by searching the art-work title, ‘Here After Here After Here’, along with the country Austria, it was an interesting experience for me to hit that link and view the work from above. It seemed to close the loop of how the work itself was conceived.
Are there any other iterations of ‘Here After Here After Here’ planned anywhere else?
Not yet, but I has always thought of multiple global iterations of ‘Here After Here After Here’ - sculptures linked by their mutual planetary distance and linking places all over the world, like an infinite measuring tape surfacing at different points on the planet.