E.V. Day, interview | Peking University, Beijing | 27 May 2018

In a riveting, large-scale work called Moss Ball: A Meditation on the Overview Effect (2018), E.V. Day makes some unlikely, and therefore all the more intriguing, connections.
She imaginatively links together disparate structures in an associative, appropriative weave, likening a moss ball, a decorative item in a formal baroque garden, to the view of the Earth from the point of view of an astonished astronaut seeing it from space for the first time as well as to the explosive sensuality that is Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and to his gilded architectural fantasias with their cascades of slender golden rods that represent rays of heavenly light.
A gorgeous three-dimensional starburst (she calls it a “sputnik”) is affixed to the flat surface of her moss ball cum globe like a constellated brooch, tethered to a slender wire that traverses the gallery to the opposite wall, suggesting a divine shaft of light.
Intersection: International Art and Culture, Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2018
Interview by LILLY WEI
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY