Bharti Kher to Create Monumental Entrance Sculpture for Powerhouse Parramatta
Powerhouse Parramatta will open with a work by British-Indian artist Bharti Kher (b. 1969) at its front door. The new commission, Tree of Life, will serve as the entrance sculpture for the cultural center in Parramatta, west of Sydney, when the museum opens in late 2026.
The piece will rise to a height of 7 meters and will feature 14 stacked bronze and clay heads, extending Kher’s Intermediaries series, which she began in 2016. In that body of work, she has repeatedly transformed found ritual fragments into hybrid forms that feel at once ceremonial and unsettled. The new commission continues that approach on a larger public scale.
Kher has said the series began after roughly 500 clay figurines arrived broken at her studio in Delhi. As she repaired them, the project took on a deeper conceptual frame, one shaped by family memory, ancestral complexity, and diasporic identity. That origin story remains central to the series’ emotional charge: the works do not simply preserve damaged objects, but reimagine them as carriers of continuity.
Tree of Life is not Kher’s first major public commission. From fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor, an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure related to the same lineage of work, was installed in Central Park. Earlier, from 2018 to 2020, The Intermediary Family, based on small clay objects from South India, stood in front of Harvard Business School.
Powerhouse Parramatta will be the flagship site of the Powerhouse consortium, which also includes Powerhouse Ultimo, Powerhouse Castle Hill, and the Sydney Observatory. The new building complex, clad in a white steel crisscrossing exoskeleton, will house art galleries, a theater space, artist studios, and a rooftop garden. Kher called it “a modern-day cultural hub for Sydneysiders of all backgrounds.”
As one of Australia’s most closely watched museum openings takes shape, Kher’s commission suggests the institution is aiming for more than a ceremonial threshold. It is setting a tone: expansive, public, and rooted in the language of transformation.
