LIGHTNING ROD, Regen’ts Park, London, 2024.
Public Sculpture.

Kirstine Roepstorff presented her new work LIGHTNING ROD at Frieze Sculpture 2024, and conceived the project in response to the context of The Regent’s Park as a site of conglomeration and connection. LIGHTNING ROD highlights a shift in our understanding of energy, exploring how it can be captured, stored, transformed, and, most importantly, applied, for both destruction and creation. Roepstorff suggests that by refining what she refers to as our ‘inner technology’, we can unveil invisible aspects of existence. The multi-part sculpture incorporates cast bronze forms and natural stones to symbolize a speculative potential of energy transfer. Roepstorff poses the question: if lightning hit the bronze figures with enough force to crack open rocks, what revelations would emerge? Similarly, the installation contemplates the wisdom and skill needed to navigate energy. Through proportional reference, an elongated bronze conch shell evokes the human form, prompting consideration of what it might take for us to yield physically to the universe’s power, and to open up the stone’s potential along with our own.

LIGHTNING ROD is part of Roepstorff’s ongoing project Earth School, which explores humanity’s place in an expanding and shifting world. Reflecting on our inability to navigate time and space, Roepstorff revisits ancient and forgotten techniques, such as the celestial navigation methods traditionally used by sailors to traverse oceans. Roepstorff likens such skills to an ‘inner technology’ that has been replaced by a modern reliance on external devices and systems. Earth School embodies slow, visual poetry, inviting viewers to revive connection with the elemental forces that define our existence.

Set against the backdrop of LIGHTNING ROD, viewers were invited to weekly classes to activate the elemental power of Qigong, an ancient practice rooted in movement, meditation and breath work.