Thrive

What you are looking at

A colossal figure, seen from the chest up, rises from the pavement under the overhang of a residential tower. Her eyes are closed and her face is calm. Fine cracks and seams run across her concrete skin like the joints of carved stone or the lines of a broken mask. With both enormous hands she grips the edges of her own torso and pulls it open. Inside, where a heart would be, is a mass of living green: ferns and trailing plants spilling out of the opening.

The opening is big enough to walk through. Visitors pass between her hands into the planted interior and out again, so the sculpture is also a doorway.

The artist and the commission

Daniel Popper is a South African artist based in Cape Town, known for monumental figures that combine the human body with plants and organic forms. His public commissions in cities around the world include Modem Swamp and Chasm.

Thrive was made in 2020 for Society Las Olas, a residential development in the Las Olas district of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. According to the artist, it reworks an earlier concept he first realized as Ven a la Luz in Mexico. He has described the piece as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to climate change: an image of nature persisting inside the city and a message of growth and calm.

How it is made

The figure stands about 27 feet (roughly 8 meters) high. It is built from glass fiber reinforced concrete, a light, strong cast material often used for architectural cladding, over a steel structure, with fiberglass elements. The surface is left bare and gray, and Popper sculpts the cracks into it deliberately, so the body reads as something weathered and fragile even though it is new.

Close looking

The best detail is the hands. The fingers are long and slightly elongated, with the knuckles and nails carefully modeled, and they do not tear the chest so much as part it, like curtains. Compare the smooth, sleeping face with the rough, broken edges of the torso: Popper sets serenity against rupture. At night, as in this photograph, the green interior is lit from within and glows against the concrete.

Visiting

Thrive is outdoors at Society Las Olas in downtown Fort Lauderdale and can be seen from the street. See more of the artist at Daniel Popper, and other large-scale public figures in Famous Sculptures, such as Ocean Atlas.