The latest art blockbuster at Tasmania's ground-breaking MONA opens this morning.
Théo Mercier, French artist and stage director, presents an immense sand sculpture inhabiting MONA's former library space.
Created in situ from sand and water, MIRRORSCAPE depicts a debris-strewn landscape evoking the aftermath of disaster. It will be on display for a whole year.
Mercier’s site-specific installation is a new work commissioned by MONA, and its presentation is his first time exhibiting in Australia.
MIRRORSCAPE draws inspiration from the detritus of the island and sites where nature and human production collide, as well as local rock formations that have been altered over time -transformed by wind, water runoff and waves.
The multi-layered sculpture "explores a tension between erasure and erosion, the scene corroding our sense of time and scale," Mercier says: ‘The earth shuffles and trembles. It is a collection of catastrophes and its surface bears witness to the natural and political changes - and cataclysms - that pass through it.
"In this work devastation finds itself petrified in the stone, as if we opened a mountain here in Tasmania and discovered the great fossil of a disaster.
"We don’t know whether this would have happened in the past or if it’s a foreshadowing of the near future. MIRRORSCAPE is a conflict suspended in time, quarantined inside a panoramic cell that recalls the scientific laboratory or a vivarium. It is something to be studied at a distance.’
MONA curator Sarah Wallace says: ‘Crafted entirely from Tasmanian sand, Théo's work is a reflection of the fragile and temporary nature of the world around us, and of life itself. I hope visitors will be drawn in by the intricate detail in this captivating installation, while considering the questions he raises about our ecological predicament.’
Théo Mercier is a sculptor and stage director, who lives and works in Paris.
See mona.net.au
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