Eighty tonnes of sand and junk: why Mona’s latest exhibition is destined to collapse in front of our eyes

Théo Mercier, the French visual artist, choreographer and stage director, has spent months in Tasmania taking photos of junk.

In Mirrorscape, an exhibition that opened on the weekend at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), he and an international team of expert sculptors – Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Sue McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini – used 80 tonnes of compacted sand to recreate the scenes of decay and detritus he found, serving them as a mirror of our own ruin. It’s a ghostly scene of domestic, environmental and industrial decay in still life, and it’s beautiful.

Fine, clay-rich sand collected from a Tasmanian quarry has been compacted and sculpted into hyperrealistic shapes to scale: from the threaded cushioning of a mattress and a crumpled old pillow to the brittle, snapped gum tree trunk and a side-view mirror dangling off a wrecked ute, the intricacies are replicated to perfection. They’re also very Australian, right down to the impossibly well-crafted twisted sheets of corrugated iron.

“It was really important to me that everything was really strongly locally grounded, so that you can actually see your own mattress, your own car, your own catastrophe,” Mercier says of his first exhibition in Australia. “And the title, Mirrorscape: it’s a landscape that mirrors you.”

He’s brought our rubbish back into the house, holding it up for acknowledgement and responsibility while creating the space for all the questions we don’t want to ask. Mercier says he spends much of his time playing between the two poles of attraction and repulsion and bringing things from the periphery to the centre.

“For example, bringing this desperate landscape, the one from the dump, the one from this trash place that you don’t want to see, that is put outside the city, I put it back in the middle of the city, in the place – in the fetish place – the museum, where you are paying to see something. At those other places you pay to make an object disappear, and now you are paying to see it. Somehow, the ghosts are back and they’re in the centre.”

The work was created in situ, in the former library space deep in the guts of Mona’s concrete industrial labyrinth. The sculpture takes up one whole wall, flanked by muted stainless steel and protected by glass.

The sterile feel of the steel is juxtaposed with the soft warmth of the natural sand, which contrasts again with the destruction and decay depicted.

“What interests me is the contrast between the violence of the scene and the calmness, the stillness,” Mercier says. “There is something really soft and really epic at the same time.”

Mercier has left his work deliberately ambiguous. While it’s clearly about human impact and destruction, the timeline is unclear, as is the force to blame. It looks like the aftermath of a tsunami, perhaps a cyclone or explosion, but it’s not quite. The addition of naturally eroded sandstone cliffs, seemingly subsuming the ute and other man-made objects, add to the story.

“It’s like a specimen – a specimen for what?” Mercier asks. “A fossil from the future? Prophetic stone? It’s a bit lost in time – you don’t know if it’s something really archaic or really prophetic.”

Also unknown is how long the artwork will last. It’s a dynamic piece of work, designed to decay before our eyes over the year that it is on display at Mona.

“Sand is a really interesting material because it represents landscape degradation,” Mercier says. “We are destroying mountains, emptying rivers, making islands disappear to build our cities, our streets, our houses, so we are destroying to build, but we are building our own destruction.

“In this case, I built the ruin, I built the destruction, and now we will look at this destroyed landscape going back to its original state: the sand. It’s a man-made landscape that can go back to its natural state.

“You can see a giant sand clock: weeks after weeks, months after months it will erode … The landscape will disappear and the sand will remain and continue on its own journey. What we are seeing now is just one moment.”