Peter Lundberg on Travellers

‘Travellers’ consists of 26 small sculptures meant for enlargement. Best to shrink way down to mouse size for this experiment. Fasten seat belts as warp speed perspectives will transform imminently and shall now begin. Ready? Imagine walking through a forest of ‘Travellers’, three to five times human size. In the grand scope of things, this is tremendously important. Let me explain. Comparing oneself to shapes both larger and smaller is a seminal experience that begins at birth. All our lives we marvel at the planets in the sky, the grains of sand on the beach and things jarringly unequal in scale when compared to things more familiar, a car, home, tree or dog, for instance. Should we encounter an ant or a black hole, there is a natural lack of understanding due to scale. Reassessment becomes necessary. We squint our eyes, build microscopes, employ virtual reality and the new WEBB telescope, all do deal with this problem. To help us better see and understand as the explanation, “God made it”, doesn’t really solve the puzzle. We can read about heaven, believe in it, but not experience it, yet.

The Egyptian pyramids and Nazca lines in the earth, on a scale beyond anything man ever made before or since, were clearly built-in response to the heavens. How on earth did they imagine this, not to mention build them? We still don’t know, maybe we will never know. Both the pyramids and Nazca lines are seen from the heavens, bonding humanity to nature, the universe, the stars and earth. They are sculptures, after all, inherently both mysterious and self-referential. And at this scale, also celestial.

I choose to make my largest sculptures, like ‘Meteorite’, directly and with the same intensity and spontaneity as diving off the high board. But in ‘Travellers’, forms are more precise and mathematical. ‘Travellers’ explore some of the most highly manipulated parts of my language, borrowing from cubism, architecture, musical crescendo, poetic waxing of the figure, David Byrne's suits, Dolly Parton’s hairdo and making things bigger in general. That’s where ’Travellers' are travelling to, a place where they are larger than us. If we want to live on other planets, we must prepare for all sizes. Think of the scale difference between a toy Tonka truck and a Terex MT 6300AC. That’s what we are dealing with here. The jump may make us uncomfortable, at first, like eating fermented herring for the first time, but we henceforth become stronger and humanity advances. I think this is how the Egyptians were thinking.

‘Travellers’ build up to a pinnacle, like a skyscraper and express an idea, just one detail perhaps, one exact definition. Besides imagining how the sculpture will look from two-dimensional paper, I am now upscaling using 3D scanning technology. The scale of this enlargement process takes the handmade form somewhere else, to the unknown, to a world where things float in space. It is a simple language, direct and definitive. The ancients used this technique also, like with the’ Colossus of Rhodes’. Working on a small scale, intending to enlarge, also begins a whole new way of thinking, adding to my language. ‘Travellers’ represent a new way forward.