One regards »The Gate« and »Borderline Warrior« as two outside wings in a huge triptych of people striving towards decision making and overcoming their fear of the unknown, then the middle wing of the monument is made up of a project not yet carried out.
It is only the work which isn’t completed, the idea for the project has been in existence for a long time. The idea for the title, however, came just as suddenly and surprisingly as the impulses for the previous works. Cronhammar sees himself as a type of »media« and calls these rays of visual inspiration »beams«. Apparantly they can be found at quite inconvenient places and times. Cronhammar got the idea for the name »Elia« while reading a motor magazine; and it was before he actually realized who this »Eliah« was. He looked up an encyclopedia and found a referance in the bible about holy man and a revelation. The account is in the 2nd Book of Kings and is about the prophet Eliah’s ascension, of how a chariot of fire and horses came and picked Eliah up from the middle of af raging storm and carried him to heaven. The name suited the project as if they had never been separated.
A lot of what Cronhammar has made up to now has in a deeper sense occured to him to be a type of landscape feature or a set price. The floor and space have always forced him to admittance and compromises. »Elia« on the other hand splits every physical limit and defines its own. It is the first of Cronhammars works which is thought of as an outdoor installation and rightly marked as an installation of gigantic ambitions, and according to him it would take an atom bomb to move it.
In its fully-growen condition, »Elia« will look like a volcanic crater, whose profile is roughly convex. It is also similar to an inca temple, a factory and a nuclear power station. The ground area is a circle with a radius of 30 m. As with »The Great«, one has to climb the work in order to experience it. The entrance to »the mouth« is via 4 graduating steps which seen from above make an isosceles cross. The entire monument has the shape of the top of an enormous spherical dish of black iron which is elevated 15 m above earth and whose topside is crowned with 4 iron sails over a square with a side of 10 m. The sails bear nothing but a global lamp with a red light. They connect a low rail from where one can look down into the dish. If one dares.
From the deep of the shaft a »coincidental generator« spits up a multi meter high gas flame at undpredictable intervals, like af volcano hurling lava out of its crater, or purgatory giving its hottest breath. But there is more to it than heat and a vision. The bottom or base of »Elia« is formed like af concrete parabol, in bad weather the parabol will pick up and concentrate thunder from heaven and send it back to where it came from. One would feel as if the strength from earths core joins with the fires of heaven to show that everything above our heads and below our feet is connected and we can look upon ourselves as being a very small part of a great entirety, which we call the universe.
A person is still a fascinated spectator of the incomprehensible and wonderful mystery which is our existence. Fascinated, overwhelmed and shaken deep within the soul. That is how it has been since the beginning of time and so it is still in the 21st, and that which eventually follows.
