In collaboration with Konstservice Region Skåne, Bigert & Bergström completed a commission for the new forensic psychiatric center, RPC, in Trelleborg, Sweden. The project consists of two interactive sculptural elements connecting the building’s exterior grounds and the visitor center within.

The first part of the installation, Mirror Dewdrops, consists of three polished stainless-steel sculptures in the shape of dewdrops, two installed outside the building’s entrance and one placed inside. Visitors are invited to sit on the metal sculptures, which—in a departure from viewers’ likely expectations—are heated from within to a pleasantly warm temperature. Inside the building, the hanging Mother-of-Pearl Clouds comprises six acrylic light sculptures that change colors depending on the weather outside.

An obvious connection between the dewdrop and the cloud is the hydrologic water cycle that affects the climate, various ecosystems, and all living organisms. But the two forms also reveal other kinds of information: the stainless-steel dewdrops reproduce both their visual surroundings and the hidden interior heat of the earth—the deep time of planetary background radiation—while the clouds, connected via the Internet to a constantly updated weather service, generate different hues that mimic the current weather situation, indicating the immediacy of our fluctuating atmosphere.

Mirror Dewdrops and Mother-of-Pearl Clouds also responds to the site by linking the weather to psychological atmospheres. Numerous analogies describe temper or mood using climatic terms, and parallels between clouds and emotions are plentiful: head in the clouds, on cloud nine, angry as a thundercloud, a mind surrounded by dark clouds etc. The dewdrops, too, evoke emotional states: they can be viewed as teardrops magnified a thousand times.

 

"Mirror Dewdrop and Mother-of-Pearl Cloud," 2016
Stainless steel, electric heat cables, acrylic spheres,
RGB-LED’s, weather data feed, computer, various sizes