When Powerhouse Parramatta, the enormous new cultural center opening in the city of Parramatta west of Sydney, Australia, opens later this year, a new commission by the British-Indian sculptor Bharti Kher will welcome visitors as the entrance. Art Asia Pacific reported the news. The sculpture, titled Tree of Life, will be monumental in scale and will be made up of four stacked bronze and clay heads. Tree of Life is part of Kher’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series, which she began making in 2016. Many of these large-scale sculptures re-create or transform fragments of found ritual objects into hybrid creatures. The Powerhouse Parramatta commission is not Kher’s first foray into public art: from fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor, an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure also referencing an “Intermediary” piece, was installed in Central Park, and from 2018-20, The Intermediary Family, based on a collection of small clay objects from South India, was installed in front of Harvard Business School. In an interview with ARTnews, Kher explained that the “Intermediaries” series started when some 500 clay figurines she’d …