Spanda
Image source Jarrad Seng
Artist: Christian de Vietri, ShapeShift
Asset Type: Sculpture
Year of Work: 2016
Location: Geoffrey Bolton Avenue, Perth, WA.
Provenance: City of Perth
Description: Spanda is a 9 story-high sculpture made of carbon fiber located in Perth, Western Australia. It was commissioned for fabrication by the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority of Western Australia and installed at Elizabeth Quay in 2016.
Intended as an icon to uplift the city and its inhabitants, the idea of human identity being constituted of layers or sheaths was a starting point for the sculpture’s design. These layers represent the contours and constituents of the human experience, proceeding from gross to subtle as one moves from the periphery to the core. The exponential repetition of the arch form creates the impression of an infinite vibration, a pattern of self-similarity that is intended to trigger the viewer's inner experience of wholeness, the recognition of themselves as individual expressions of the universal, intimately interconnected, and one with their total environment.
The sculpture was designed to have a strong sense of presence without being imposing nor obscuring any building or vantage point. It is aligned with the site such that the curvature of the form contrasts with gridded square buildings behind it. The arch-like quality of the form is mysteriously functionless as it is neither an entrance nor an exit, but stands alone, declaring its own liminal space for the viewer to merge with. The structure was built by a team of expert digital fabricators and engineers who re-purposed carbon fibre manufacturing technology from the aerospace industry to enable a truly unique civil structure that would not have been possible in traditional materials.
The title of the work is a Sanskrit word meaning “divine cosmic vibration”. This term is used to describe how Consciousness generates and resorbs the manifest world by expanding and contracting in waves of its own expressive capacity. The sculpture is intended to be both a formal representation of this ‘spanda’ principle, and a tool, or means, to stimulate its experience.
“We praise that Śankara who is the source of the power of the wheel of energies by whose expansion (unmeśa) and contraction (nimeśa) the universe is absorbed and comes into being.” Kallaṭa, Spanda-kārikās (trans. Mark Dyczkowski)
