The Four Corners Project is the construction of the world’s largest sculpture using the least amount of materials. It consists of an invisible tetrahedron spanning the inside of the earth with the outer four corners just protruding from the crust of the earth. These visible corners are located in Easter Island, South Africa, Irian Jaya (New Guinea), and Greenland, with imaginary planes extending through the earth from each corner to the other three.  The corner is a pinnacle of marble (a four inch tetrahedron) barely emerging from the ground like a sprouting plant. The sculpture is a color/form of such vastness that, like the planet itself, it is impossible to perceive it as an entity. Its viability resides in its being collectively constructed and collectively experienced. Its process of construction and communication will be a cultural/geographic/spiritual/esthetic metaphor.

            The project has laminations of data and concepts which give it resonance beyond its temporal physical character. Easter Island is known to its native inhabitants as Te Pito No Te Henua, the “Navel of the World,” and the first corner was created there. Its exact co-ordinates are 27° 6’ 20” S, 109° 25’ 30” W.

            The second corner was implanted at Reivilo, South Africa (near Kimberly, known for its diamond mines). The exact co-ordinates are 27° 30’ 36” S, 24° 30’ 6’ E which place it on the farm Karee Boom.

            Greenland follows where 72° 38’ 24” N, 41° 55’ 12” W is on the ice cap three km above sea level.

            The final corner was placed in Irian Jaya with the co-ordinates of 2° 6’ 36”, 137° 23’ 24” E placing it about six miles inland from the northwest coast.

            Greenland is the largest island on Earth. New Guinea is the second largest. Easter Island, fourteen miles long, produced one of the most isolated and spectacular cultures of the world. And Africa is currently considered to be the cradle of the human species.

            Because of its scale, and thus proportion of error to size, the alignment of the corners establishes the most “accurate” manmade structure on Earth.

            It is the largest sculpture that can be built on, and of, the Earth. The sides of the resultant tetrahedron are 6464.79 miles long. Paradoxically, it may be preserved by its magnitude and its obscurity.

            This project, as an act of constructive creation, has at its core a faith in humanity and a faith that, when we are united by the arts, the world community is most loving, most sane, and most human. The structures that bind humans through interests, needs, relationships, heritage, intellect, faith, and understanding, are an invisible filigree of connective links, a filigree that embraces innumerable people in the past, present, and future. When our spirit is enlarged, enriched, and enjoyed through connection, it moves quite naturally toward the celebration of that reality. The culmination of connection is celebration in its most transcendent form.

David Barr, 1976-1985