Astra
PERMANENT PUBLIC ARTWORK · 2026
- ArtistDavid Spriggs
- LocationRobert B. Docking State Office Building, Topeka, Kansas, USA
- CommissionState of Kansas
- DimensionsApprox. 610 × 427 × 366 cm
20 × 14 × 12 ft - MaterialsTwenty nine UV printed acrylic planes, suspension hardware, steel beams, LED lighting, and mirrored stainless steel panels
Astra forms a suspended field of colour and image within the civic interior. Its transparent planes gather into the image of a cloud, then disperse into fragments, reflections, and intervals as the viewer moves beneath it.
Clouds are among the least stable images in visual culture. They can signal weather, transformation, distance, uncertainty, or the difficulty of fixing a form that is continually changing. Here, the cloud is given architectural scale without becoming solid. It occupies the atrium as a mutable presence whose form depends upon viewpoint, light, and movement.
The work is therefore not a fixed object observed from outside. Its image continually forms and unforms within the viewer’s field of vision, bringing the architecture, the body, and the changing conditions of the site into the work.
Colour held in suspension
Pale white and blue establish the work’s vaporous boundary, while pink and magenta gather towards a denser chromatic centre. Because the colour is distributed through depth, it does not sit on a surface. It accumulates, overlaps, and thins in space.
This spatial colour gives the cloud a paradoxical presence. It appears luminous and substantial from a distance, yet no single plane contains the form. What seems materially present is produced through an alignment of partial images.
Ad Astra per Aspera
The title extends the Kansas motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, towards the stars through difficulty. Rather than illustrating the phrase, the artwork holds its terms in tension. Weight and suspension, difficulty and ascent, structure and immateriality become perceptible as the image gathers overhead.
The cloud also brings the unstable scale of atmospheric imagery into a public building. It is simultaneously immediate and remote, a form situated within architecture but visually opening towards another spatial register.
Material structure
The image is divided across twenty nine UV printed acrylic planes suspended from steel beams. LED lighting and mirrored stainless steel panels extend the work optically through the atrium. The physical construction is precise, but the completed image remains provisional.
From a principal viewpoint the layers coalesce into a volumetric cloud. From below and from oblique positions, the image stretches and reveals the measured distances between its parts. Construction establishes the conditions of the work; perception completes its form.
Commission context
Astra was commissioned by the State of Kansas for the Robert B. Docking State Office Building in Topeka. The permanent work was conceived for the building’s tall central atrium, where it can be encountered from multiple levels and changing lines of sight.