The Bowl and the Pearl is a site-specific installation for Holmegårds Plads in Kokkedal, created in connection with a major climate adaptation project. The site extends between a school, a care centre, a shopping mall, cycle paths and a road. Many different aspects therefore had to be taken into consideration to meet the needs of the area’s users.
The work is made up of two physical parts and a visual, pictorial dimension. It’s heart is an area of about 50 x 35 meters, covered with white and grey marble gravel, which gives the surface a light, unifying and homogeneous expression. In the middle the actual area has the form of a bowl. If you go right down into the middle of the bowl, you will have a feeling, as when you lie in a hollow in the sand dunes, of being hidden from the world, of being in an intimate sheltering room while still being within the larger communal space. The form and edges of the bowl are soft. It’s steeper at the northern end, less steep towards the south, which is the end that faces the care centre. The bottom of the bowl will always be dry, and it has a drain.
The other element of the sculpture is a pearl, an oval white container of about 2 x 3 meters, cast in polyester, which is weather-proof, and mounted on the care centre’s 20-meter high roof. By day the pearl appears as a sculpture, a white and alien mother-of-pearl jewel, which in its form mimics the shape of the bowl.
The pearl contains a powerful projector, which when darkness falls projects pictures of poppies down onto the bowl. You see a poppy filmed from above supplemented by timelapses of poppies opening. In the dark the poppies unfold their fragile, silky red petals in the middle of the town’s space. Like an image of the night’s dreams, of the image-creating power of poetry, of all that is also part of what it is to be human. During the night the area is transformed into a soft field. A bouquet in the bowl: a bouquet for Holmegårds Plads.
