“It was wonderful to get off the plane and start making things again,” says American artist Sarah Sze. We are in a vast Victorian waiting room in Peckham, south London, standing in front of a huge globe-like structure created from hundreds of slender steel rods, its interior hung with hand-torn paper sheets that act as miniature screens. Images, colours and intermittent sounds swirl around the room.
Behind is another sculpture of spindly wire branches and delicate paper leaves: a fragile, post-apocalyptic garden that Sze (pronounced “zee”) made over 48 hours, after she got off the red-eye from New York last week. “I kept thinking, don’t get sick, don’t get sick, you’ve only got 24 hours left to do this,” she says. In the spirit of 19th-century lantern shows, stacks of white projectors spin through this man-made foliage, casting shadows of different sizes on to the room’s distressed walls.
Sze is known for extraordinary installations that combine the material and the digital, where structures and objects are subject to a continual flow of moving imagery. She currently has a major show, Timelapse, at the Guggenheim in New York, where her sculptures fill the bays at the top of its spiralling ramp like restless flickering machines. The head of security recently told her that visitors are taking longer to go through her exhibition than any other he has worked on; with Sze’s work, every time you look, something else is happening. She never shows you the same thing twice.