In August, the site-specific sculpture that BAP Art Projects has commissioned from Mat Chivers, entitled Genius Loci, went into fabrication at Pangolin Editions, a sculpture foundry in Gloucestershire, UK.

The sculpture—which will stand 2.6 metres high when completed—has been 3D printed in over one-hundred separate components that will be joined together and cast in bronze. The sculpture will be installed in relation to an experimental vineyard on a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. For more on the project’s progress please follow BAP and Mat Chivers on Instagram.

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Artist statement

Genius Loci
2025
Patinated bronze, concrete base
2.6 m H x 1.9 m W x 1.9 m D

Genius Loci is sited in relation to an experimental vineyard established by the neuroscientist Jonathan Brotchie whose research focuses on Parkinson’s disease. The sculpture has evolved from a dialogue between us at the intersection of our interests in an attempt to allude to the complex web of affinity between the environment that it inhabits and our own internal landscapes. The work’s title is an animistic term used to describe the prevailing character or atmosphere of a site—the spirit of the place. Genius loci has kinship with terroir, a term used to describe the complex web of relationships between human and more-than-human ecologies that define the character of a wine.

The sculpture is formed of a branching network—a fundamental motif in the way material reality is structured over vastly different levels of scale, from quantum to universal. Like the novel vines near it, it’s also a product of hybridisation—a synthesis of handmade and digital. The form of the sculpture is derived from a series of handmade plaster objects that were digitally scanned and assembled virtually, then 3d printed, cast in bronze, and patinated by hand. The work is the sum of its self-similarity—an exploration of the interplay between order and chaos in a complex, bilaterally symmetrical, furcating system.

Circumnavigating the sculpture it appears elusive and ambiguous—simultaneously neurological and vegetal, animal, coralline and mycorrhizal—not one thing or the other, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It’s only when the viewer arrives a few degrees to square on two sides of the sculpture that the symmetry in the work becomes apparent. Symmetry is a recurring theme in my work. I’m interested in how the experience of symmetry allows us to see ourselves seeing—to experience our perceptual biology. We experience our minds trying to make sense of the uncanny conjunction.

Symmetry stimulates pareidolia, a perceptual response that has evolved through natural selection to make sense of the world. Pareidolia refers to the tendency to perceive pattern in random visual stimuli—faces in clouds or Jesus in a piece of toast. This widely experienced phenomenon has been shown to relate to increased activity in a part of the brain that plays a role in facial recognition. Researchers propose that pareidolia gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage, enabling them to avoid danger by being able to identify potential threats from other humans and animals more efficiently. There is a higher incidence of pareidolia in people who have Parkinson’s disease for reasons that aren’t yet known

Like a three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot, how the viewer attributes meaning to the psychedelic fecundity that results from the symmetrical conjunction in the sculpture—neural network or cosmic web, vertebrae or vulva—says as much about them as it does about the sculpture

-Mat Chivers