Between Earth and Cloud
Year: 2022
Technique & Material: 3D printed fluorescent PLA, UV black light, steel (various dimensions)
Installation photos by: David Stjernholm
Technique & Material: 3D printed fluorescent PLA, UV black light, steel (various dimensions)
Installation photos by: David Stjernholm
In the ancient Chinese
legend Pangu (盤古), the separator of sky
(yang) and earth (yin), is said to have come from an egg. Once
hatched, this giant lived for eighteen thousand years. When he died, the world
we know emerged from his decaying body: flesh became soil, hair vegetation, his
last breath became the wind. The parasites that once lived on his skin
proliferated on the planet as animals.
Between Earth and Cloud takes this foundational myth as its point of departure. The sculptural installation, comprising two connected parts, presents a cacophony of parasitic traces, imprints, limbs, shells, and hybrid objects lit in ultraviolet. This black light, a wavelength undetectable by the human eye, symbolically suggests that life as we perceive it is only a fragment of the wider world.
Meditating on the inherent paradox of parasitical life, in which two or more organisms exist in a state of symbiosis, the work expands the notion of home. The podium, like Pangu’s egg, can be separated into two constituent parts that have an almost biological attraction between earth and sky, host and parasite, the analogue and the digital.
Between Earth and Cloud takes this foundational myth as its point of departure. The sculptural installation, comprising two connected parts, presents a cacophony of parasitic traces, imprints, limbs, shells, and hybrid objects lit in ultraviolet. This black light, a wavelength undetectable by the human eye, symbolically suggests that life as we perceive it is only a fragment of the wider world.
Meditating on the inherent paradox of parasitical life, in which two or more organisms exist in a state of symbiosis, the work expands the notion of home. The podium, like Pangu’s egg, can be separated into two constituent parts that have an almost biological attraction between earth and sky, host and parasite, the analogue and the digital.