Théo Mercier

We’ve dug up Mona’s old library, figuratively speaking, and had the hole filled by Théo Mercier—a French artist and stage director with a captivating process and a crack team of sand sculptors. His immense installation is constructed, on site, from sand sourced from a local quarry.

Mercier presents us with a catastrophic landscape—a great sandpit awash with debris and cold light, suggesting the aftermath of disaster. A hurricane, a tsunami, or a landslide, or perhaps a war zone after a bomb blast. The artist describes his artificial world as like some laboratory specimen trapped in a ‘panoramic cell’ behind glass and flanked by aluminium plates; like a photograph frozen in time; or like ‘a fossilisation’ discovered in a rocky outcrop, cliff or shoreline… Or is this strange diorama a vision of what’s to come? David Walsh once said the rising ocean would swallow his museum in the not-too-distant future.

As such, Mercier’s new work at Mona is no mere spectacle, nor an invitation to disaster voyeurism. His time here making the work, and interest in Tasmanian detritus—of human and natural origin—was informed by local rock formations and, in particular, the way sandstone changes and moves over time, transformed by wind, water runoff and waves. In this sense Mercier’s disastrous scene corrodes our sense of time and scale. Past or present? Fossil or future? The thunderclap impact of catastrophe, up against the long work of erosion and nature’s processes over millennia.

Which is to say: Mercier’s creative process reflects on our treatment of the Earth as it ‘bears witness’ to the natural and human-wrought carnage visited upon its surface. This landscape is a mirror, the artist says, in which we might glimpse our predicament—and our chance to alter course, before it’s too late.

Artistic direction by Théo Mercier
Curated by Jarrod Rawlins, Olivier Varenne and Sarah Wallace
Sand sculptors: Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Sue McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini
Project manager and artistic advisor: Céline Peychet
Sand work manager and compactor: Kevin Crawford
3D design assistant: Marius Belmeguenai

Special thanks from the artist to the technical team of Mona

Image: MIRRORSCAPE, 2025, Théo Mercier
Sand, stainless steel and glass