When Powerhouse Parramatta, the enormous new cultural center opening in the city of Parramatta west of Sydney, Australia, opens later this year, a new commission by the British-Indian sculptor Bharti Kher will welcome visitors as the entrance. Art Asia Pacific reported the news.
The sculpture, titled Tree of Life, will be monumental in scale and will be made up of four stacked bronze and clay heads. Tree of Life is part of Kher’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series, which she began making in 2016. Many of these large-scale sculptures re-create or transform fragments of found ritual objects into hybrid creatures. The Powerhouse Parramatta commission is not Kher’s first foray into public art: from fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor, an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure also referencing an “Intermediary” piece, was installed in Central Park, and from 2018-20, The Intermediary Family, based on a collection of small clay objects from South India, was installed in front of Harvard Business School.
In an interview with ARTnews, Kher explained that the “Intermediaries” series started when some 500 clay figurines she’d collected over the course of many years arrived to her studio in Delhi broken. As she began repairing them, the series was born, suggesting “a familial life, a mélange of unconventionality, ancestral complexity, and diasporic identity that brings with it both geographical and psychosocial dissonances.”
In a statement about the commission, Kher referred to Powerhouse Parramatta as “a modern-day cultural hub for Sydneysiders of all backgrounds.” The new museum is part of the Powerhouse consortium of museums in Sydney, which includes three other sites owned by the New South Wales government (Powerhouse Ultimo, Powerhouse Castle Hill, and the Sydney Observatory).
Powerhouse Parramatta is scheduled to open in late 2026 and will be Powerhouse’s flagship site. The two side-by-side buildings are clad in a white steel crisscrossing exoskeleton and will house several art galleries, a theater space, artist studios, and a rooftop garden.
