Over the weeks, visitors have made the trek to seek out the sculpture – its location remains tricky to pinpoint despite the help of maps – after seeing it on social media.
Carved from white marble, the baby is curled up as if in slumber, its eyes closed and lips turned down. It is laid out, exposed to the elements, on the bare ground, surrounded by the rocky Fujairah Mountains. The work is made by Italian artist Jago and is meant to remain in its place permanently.
Jago, the artist behind the work, first conceived of it in 2019 while he was living in New York City. “I saw a lot of homeless people living in the streets. When you have to run around every day to go to work, at some point, those people just disappear and become part of the environment. But I think the image of a baby will push us to stop and do something,” he tells. That same year, he returned to Italy, and it wasn’t until 2020, after Covid-19 struck, that the sculpture was realised. Seeing the effects of lockdown on the vulnerable and the poor, including the homeless, Jago returned to the idea of an infant, a figure that easily connotes vulnerability and helplessness. Within eight months, he made Look Down (a play on “lockdown”), a baby in fetal position with a chain cuffed to its wrist.
In his works, the sculptor, who was born in Italy, draws from personal reflection, but uses recognisable figures and motifs to express his ideas. With clay and marble as his materials of choice, he moulds and carves sculptures that have a hint of the grotesque, from models of anatomical hearts to ghostly figures shrouded in cloth, and even a baby nestled inside the cracked skull of a male bust..
He thought back to his trip to Fujairah years ago. “It’s a very particular place because you can find mountains and the desert together. You have the sea, mountains and desert, but the sands don’t change as much, because the mountains protect it from the wind,” he says.
Co-ordinating with the Fujairah government, the artist was able to install his work at the base of the mountains off Al Manama Ras Al Khaimah Road, where it is meant to stay permanently. Exposed to wind, rain and sun, the sculpture will eventually be altered and damaged, but the artist says he now sees these changes as part of the work. With its new location, the work also earned a new name, Look Here. This time around, the artist sought a place that would be less accessible, so that the act of seeing the infant would become more intentional, deliberate.