The Shape of Time

I’m interested in creating places for people to gather and places to be alone with oneself. Working with water allows me to play with time. Water runs. In my case, I work with running water to an extreme. I create sequences.

Deep Fountain (1997–2006) was the first time I made a large-scale work using water as a material, allowing the viewer to feel time with it, the way time passes. I created a shallow surface with a crack running down the middle transversal, where the water disappears and appears again. Situated in front of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp’s central square, it becomes, when it’s full, a mirror of the building and the city. When it’s empty, it reveals a surface that resembles fictional vegetation. You might wait for it to repeat, to be the same, as you do when you look at the sea, the tidal movements of the water. But you see it in different states when you come into the museum and when you go out.

Water leaves traces. For example, in the littorals along the ocean coast, the rocks carry the imprint of the water in them, memories of the water. Erosion makes forms, creates holes. Geological time deals with memory but also with the unknown, with what is below the surface, making you conscious of that unknown.

This is what I try to bring to the experience of some of the pieces I construct, like Hondalea (2021) in San Sebastián. The word hondalea is from old Basque and it means “sea abyss.” The work is located inside a lighthouse on Santa Clara Island, where we excavated the interior base. After a journey by boat, you arrive at the island and the ecosystem it has preserved and you find yourself at the top of a small mountain. Inside the lighthouse, I constructed a bronze form that resembles a deep marine cave that seems connected with caves that go down toward the sea. You immediately connect bronze with the idea of ancient underwater treasures. Gold bronze also ages with water very well and with great complicity, turning into greens or blues. Water exists in my pieces with other materials that hold the water or that canalize it or that specifically contrast the liquidity and transformation of water. The effect of the sound of water with the metal interests me. I think sound affects us enormously.

The responsibility of constructing landscape is quite serious. I collaborate with hydraulic engineers to realize the mechanics of it. Under everything we construct, there is nature, there is water. In New York’s Madison Square Park, for example, a river, now underground, once ran through the area toward the Hudson, and I followed that same course with my piece Landscape and Memory (2022). Again, it is about the unseen. It is about playing with illusion, creating forms that look deeper than they are. Water helps me to create illusions of depth.

I continue to return to the idea of taking care of what lies beneath, remembering that nature is present and that we must care for it. Taking care of the oceans means taking care of the world and of the ecosystem. I created Estancias Sumergidas in 2010 at the bottom of the Sea of Cortez in collaboration with marine biologists from La Paz and researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Espíritu Santo is the nearby island where we installed the work seventeen meters below the surface. It’s an architecture that creates estancias—rooms to be inhabited by nature. With the biologists we chose a place where the currents were best for the creation of life. The last time I could dive there was four years ago and it was so full of life. The piece was part of a program of creating marine refuges. It is a symbol and a lab for the growth of marine life.

I am interested in ideas of growth and how nature behaves, how forms
are made, how matter develops. Roots connect with the underground but start growing and can become a tree. Or they can become something more abstract. I’m not so interested in painting or making a sculpture of a tree. I’m more interested in making a sculpture that represents that growth. And showing how, in that growth, there might be a part that’s unpredictable. A form can suddenly grow into something you were not expecting. Nature improvises just as we do.

I mix my ways of making. For example, we can carefully 3D scan a landscape, a rock. Then we create wax models and make casts from them. With those waxes, I transform and create forms. I use them as textures that have the imprint of reality, but I can create a total fantasy with those imprints. In my latest sculptures, I mix imprints that come from real nature and others that come from ideas of growth that I designed in 3D.

I have always been interested in science fiction as a literary form that addresses what you do not know, things that could be. I would like my pieces to appear as if they have always been there but at the same time as if they come from somewhere else, from another time or another planet.

This is a moment in my life that is very active and very concentrated. We just came back from installing a permanent work in Stockholm. And now we are busy with a piece that we will install next spring in London, as well as a solo exhibition that I’m preparing for Hauser & Wirth. I’m planning a major museum exhibition in Paris that will include the work Wet Labyrinth (with Spontaneous Landscape) (2020–22), which deals with real nature that surrounds the viewer and the fictional nature inside the room. I am also taking part in a show for the next Architecture Biennale in Venice.

My latest works somehow connect with pieces I did in the past, but in new ways. They deal more with transformation. You can see how matter transforms from very abstract into more geometric and crystalline forms. Nature has a tendency to organize itself. But you also have a sense of it being a non-organized system, in ways that cannot be understood.—As told to Francis Till

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“Cristina Iglesias” opens November 3 at Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street.