Cloud Cuckoo Land is a wall-mounted sculpture created using the repoussé technique of pounding metal from the reverse to create a relief. This was created for the Madison Public Library show 150×150, which provided 150 artists each a word that was coined in one of the 150 years of library history.
“Cloud Cuckoo Land” is from 1899, idiomatic term describing an impractical state of mind, an over-optimistic fantasy, or an imaginary realm entirely out of touch with reality. Someone described as “living in cloud cuckoo land” holds naive or deluded beliefs that ignore how the world truly functions.
This piece was specifically based on a novel of the same name by Anthony Doerr which interweaves five storylines across centuries, all connected by a single ancient Greek text of the same name, which tells the story of a man’s quest for a utopian paradise.