A glass mosaic covering 600 square feet of the 2nd Street entrance to the 7 train in Grand Central Station greets commuters with a bold, cosmic map. The work of Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder, of the feminist collective Hilma’s Ghost, “Abstract Futures” is a vibrant, three-part portal to transformation.
Named after the visionary artist and mystic Hilma af Klint(1862–1944), the collective formed in 2020 and typically pairs innovative contemporary art practices with spirituality. Their tarot deck has amassed a cult following and shares a name with this new MTA Arts & Design-commissioned project (previously), the group’s first public artwork.
Abstract Futures opens with “The Fool,” a tarot card representing an embrace of new beginnings. Brilliant reds, pinks, and oranges nest together in entrancing, angular forms to invoke courageous, creative intuition at the start of a journey.
In the center is “The Wheel of Fortune,” which is intended to bring this passionate, if not naive, energy back to Earth. Here, grounding greens and browns form a cyclical pattern that reflects a natural rhythm. Concentric orbs and a string of ochre diamonds propel the viewer toward the future.
The last piece in the trio is also the largest, beginning with a celestial blue triangle met by an inverted plane in orange. This pairing draws on “The World,” creating a harmonious, unified relationship between the shadows and wisdom that exist within all of us.
Red, horizontal bars at the far right call on tarot’s suit of wands. Generally associated with fire and primal energy, this final segment symbolizes regeneration and the ability to begin again.
In a statement, the artists say they hope the work inspires a new way of looking at the city:
Abstract Futures is about the connection between people, spaces, and time, and intended to provide a powerful reflection of what New York represents to us all. The city is at once a sprawling metropolis with millions of people but also a dynamic network of interconnectivity. As we make our way through a single day in New York, we connect with so many people from so many walks of life. The density of the mural’s imagery, pattern, and color is a metaphor for the endless diversity of the city that is its heartbeat.
Miotto Mosaic Art Studios fabricated the work, and you can explore Hilma’s Ghost’s collaborative projects on its website. (via Hyperallergic)
By juxtaposing the permanence of stone and marble with the transience of disposable objects, Waugh sparks an open and dissonant dialogue between piece and ponderer on consumerist culture, material value, and social norms.
By Sophie Heatley | 16 Jan 2025
When curating The Sound of Form exhibition, previous Rise Art Prize winner Tom Waugh immediately came to mind. If you’re unfamiliar with Waugh’s work, I highly recommend reading up on his practice and process. The sculptor transforms traditional materials, such as marble and stone, into hyper-realistic representations of ephemeral objects like cardboard boxes, blister packets, and plastic cups—the things we use once and then discard, oblivious to their ultimate destination as they pass from our hands to the eager, hungry mouths of our bins.
By juxtaposing the permanence of stone and marble with the transience of disposable objects, Waugh sparks an open and dissonant dialogue between piece and ponderer on consumerist culture, material value, and social norms.
It is hard not to be drawn into the immense sensory dimensions of Waugh’s work. The intricate details in his Anthropocene series preserve the fleeting imprints of human use, almost like fossils of our consumption. There is a documentary feel to each of his sculptures, ranging from crumpled ‘cardboard’ boxes to wheelie bins, without being factual or historical. They overtly challenge our understanding of waste culture without directly explaining anything at all– my favourite kind of intellectual confrontation, where you don’t realise you’re being provoked until you’re too deep in thought to turn back.
Crushed Box by Tom Waugh (Salvaged Portland Stone, 2012, 18 x 25 x 25 cm) SOLD
There is also an almost magnetic subtlety to their storytelling; each form carries a resonance that feels like a memory—perhaps of the things we, as consumers, have carelessly misused, underused, or left untouched, still in their packaging, before donating them to the local bin men. Out of sight, out of mind. The hyperrealism is… unreal. The dusty, rusty appearance of ironstone, the polished, manufactured sheen of white marble—expertly smoothed or encrusted by Waugh—are uncanny. It’s only when you move closer to the piece that you realise these aren’t discarded relics from yesteryear but exquisite representations.
“I love seeing the shift in perception when people engage with my work. When someone sees a cardboard box in a gallery, it often reinforces their prejudices about contemporary art. But then they touch it, interact with it, and realise it’s so much more than meets the eye. Something they thought was worthless suddenly becomes profound and takes on a new meaning; something valueless becomes incredibly significant.”
Size matters too. Larger-than-life works have a slightly different impact, blending the boldness of Pop Art with an unexpectedly Greek archaeological quality. By immortalising waste objects in materials of high value and amplifying their scale, his work transforms the mundane into the monumental. After viewing them, there is this strange moment when you can’t help but think: Wow, this is what the future ‘us,’ in the Year 3000, will be unearthing. Just as we’ve excavated The Rosetta Stone or, I don’t know, Knossos in Crete, imagining our ancestors’ reverence, they’ll dig up our rubbish and think we worshipped it, that we sacrificed ourselves for a plastic bag. And honestly, they wouldn’t be wrong. I love this tension—it’s eerie and endlessly fascinating.
Anyway, I digress. Yes, on observation, there is the memory it stirs. But then there is something else—equally neurological, perhaps, but more imaginatively stimulating: the sounds they seem to emit. It’s as if the pieces are saying, “Hello, it’s me, that plastic cup you thought you’d got rid of but actually just passed along for someone else to deal with.”
Waugh is no stranger to the terrifying waste mountains that accumulate across the globe—tidal waves of rubbish stretching endlessly across beaches, children scavenging scraps of metal, unwanted pens, and discarded parchments from last month’s waste spree, selling them to local makers. During university, Waugh spent time in India on an exchange programme, analysing and learning the traditional techniques of Indic carving, where he encountered the reality of untreated trash and disposables for the first time.
But back to the sound. Stone and marble are, by nature, silent and enduring materials, yet Waugh’s works suggest a narrative—or even an imagined “sound”—through their subject matter. The rattle of pills in Big Pharma III, or the satisfying crunch of foil in Big Pharma. Wassily Kandinsky once said, “No matter how abstract, every form has its own inner sound.” Here, too, another tension: the physical, unyielding permanence of the piece contrasts with the sensory experience it conjures.
I feel this soundscape deeply when observing these works; the hum of all the things we’ve left behind or overlooked, coming back to haunt us. The silence of these ghostly remains speaks louder than words. Waugh doesn’t need to colour them with explanations, anyone with an ounce of empathy for the planet will feel a rumble of guilt, of unease, the echo of something needing to change before it’s too late.
You can see works by Tom Waugh until April 2025 via our virtual gallery as part of our latest showcase, The Sound of Form.
