Due East, Due West

Union, NJ - 2011

The project concept came from the old belief that if you dug straight down you would eventually come out on the opposite side of the globe in China. To start with, using maps along with  latitude and longitude, I figured out that Babai Gaxun in Inner Mongolia China was directly opposite from Union NJ. 

Two strips of hundreds of glazed clay relief tiles were created for the opposite walls of a tunnel which went under a pair of railroad tracks at the Union New Jersey rail station. As you walked through the tunnel, the map on one wall would take you around the world in one direction and the other, in the opposite direction. I unfortunately had no luck contacting the Mayor of Babai Gaxun as much fun as it would have been to connect the “sister cities.”