This giant 44-foot head of a young girl represents paradoxically a tiny nymph that Zeus had condemned to repeat the words of others. The artist, Jaume Plesna, intended the work to invoke some contemplation by viewers as to their own repetitious conversations.
This New York Times article (
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"The work is made from an amalgam of polyester resin, white pigment and marble dust, and its glittering neck rises straight from the grass, creating an otherworldly beacon amid the furor of the Flatiron district.
As a crew put finishing touches on the foundations and the lighting last week, Mr. Plensa, 56, a charming and effusive man, paced about the site, trailed by his wife, Laura Medina, who manages his studio in Barcelona, and Debbie Landau, the director of the conservancy. “So now the conversation starts,” he murmured. Not far off, passers-by crowded up to a temporary fence, snapping photographs of the statue’s closed eyes; its elongated Modigliani-esque features, which oddly recall a hologram; and its thick, abstracted braid — Mr. Plensa’s homage to Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” (“Brancusi was following a dream in his work,” he said last month, “the concept of eternity.”)
Mr. Plensa completed his first gigantic cast female head in 2009, when his 66-foot-high “Dream,” cast in concrete and sparkling white dolomite, was installed atop a defunct colliery in St. Helens, a former coal mining town near Liverpool, England, to commemorate, he has said, the miners’ “dream of light when underground.” But his inspiration for “Echo,” his first public artwork in New York, was the nymph of Greek myth, condemned by Zeus to repeat the words of others. Mr. Plensa hopes that it will jolt busy New Yorkers into an awareness of their own voices."
Wikipedia's article on Echo (
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"Sometimes the young and beautiful nymph Echo would distract and amuse Zeus' wife Hera with long and entertaining stories while Zeus took advantage of the moment to ravish the other mountain nymphs. When Hera discovered the trickery she punished the talkative Echo by taking away her voice, except in foolish repetition of another's shouted words. Thus, all Echo could do was repeat the voice of another.[1]
Echo fell in love with a vain youth named Narcissus, who was the son of the blue Nymph Liriope of Thespia."