Sarah Sze’s installation work began receiving attention in the mid-1990s, and her “sculpted debris” aesthetic has since become instantly recognizable: she uses swarms of household objects, office supplies and other common materials to form whimsical, gravity-defying arrangements that flow along the ceilings, cover (and hover above) the floors and sometimes penetrate the walls of exhibition spaces.

Her brightly colored, intricately networked structures appear both delicate and eternal, intimate and sweeping, mechanical and emotional. She manages to infuse mass-produced goods with an undeniable organic character; her installations (sometimes aided by lights, motors, plants and water) function as self-contained ecosystems.

Her work—simultaneously architectural, sculptural and, with her effusive palette, painterly—rewards close scrutiny of its details, but the thousands of particular parts always add up to an impressive whole: A cosmos created by a witty, technically ingenious mind, with a flair for visual storytelling (even if the narrative is always ambiguous).

Sze’s work is in several important museum collections, and her “genius” status was confirmed with her receipt of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.

Sze’s most recent installation, titled Corner Plot and sponsored by N.Y.'s Public Art Fund, can be found through Oct. 22 on the northwest corner of 60th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. A replica of one corner of an apartment building (the one standing on the opposite side of the intersection), the work protrudes from the sidewalk like a sinking ship or an unearthed ruin.

Through two windows, curious passersby can see nested inside the apartment one of her signature amalgam of objects: socks, vitamins, salt, an alarm clock and other domestic flotsam. Sze recently spoke with ArtInfo about installing the project, the challenge of creating a public work in New York City and the sensibilities that guide her overall practice.

Sarah, your work typically invites viewers to spend time intensively examining small details. Was it difficult to adapt your style to a busy Manhattan street corner, where people will be rushing by?

Well, I’ve done public pieces before—but this is as public as you can get. I had never done anything this exposed. But one of the luxuries of a public piece is that you have the opportunity to have people discover the work in the context of daily life.

This location—for better or for worse—is one where the Public Art Fund has a piece regularly, so I wanted to find a way to make it so you really couldn’t say “oh, this is the next sculpture.” I wanted it so when you come across it, you are still thrown off. Your approach to it is one of discovery, not of having a work presented to you.

The second [problem] I was trying to figure out was how to compete with the scale of Manhattan. With public art, it is very difficult to get people to stop in their route, and Manhattan is such a phenomenal physical spectacle. The scale is so extreme, and that is what I was contending with.

How does the finished work confront these challenges?

The solution was partially to reflect the surroundings, to work with a scale that is already there and reflect what you already have around you—but that you’re not really looking at. That relates to the materials that I use regularly [in my work] as well—objects that are very common, but that you ordinarily don’t see. With their context or their relationship to other things adjusted, you are thrown off, and you reconsider that object in a new light. So that was the idea behind taking the corner of the building.

Also, instead of going up, because the scale is so extreme in Manhattan, I wanted to direct people down.

How long did the installation take?

We had 24 hours to put the piece in the ground. For my part of it, I had from sunrise to sunset. The hole was dug the day before.

Did it go off without a hitch?

Well, we dug and we hit the base of a sculpture that the Public Art Fund had forgotten had been there in the early 1980s. That pushed it back about a day. We did tons of research to make sure that there was nothing under there, but apparently the base of it—I think it was a [Richard] Artschwager—was left in the ground.

Your work usually plays off the already-defined borders of an existing exhibition space. How does Corner Plot relate to its surroundings, which are so wide open?

I wanted [the work] to look like it was caught somewhere between rising and sinking, so the relationship that it has to the ground is almost like when you come across something at the seashore. I also wanted to have a contradictory situation in terms of time because it would almost look like the ground had slowly eroded, and [the structure] had risen up, but it was in pristine condition, not an old relic.

After having made it, I now like the idea that it is an object that sits between many things. In fact, it’s not ever really an object, but part of the landscape: It could be landscape, it could be sculpture, it could be architecture. When you look inside, because it’s framed, it deals with painting.

What attracted you about the building you chose to replicate, this white-brick apartment building from the 1960s?

I liked the building because it is very generic, yet still dated. It has a quality of “any building” to it. It’s not like the Plaza Hotel [across the street from the installation] or an office building, which I think would have had too many connotations to the World Trade Center.

I was thinking about how there is this incredible familiarity with a building like this, but then also this subtle and complete disorientation, almost like a Thomas Demand photo. You sense overall that things are sort of wrong—that they are overly genericized. The work is really about disorientation that way. You recognize it completely, but it’s not exact.

You avoided a World Trade Center reference by not using an office building, but you did include nail clippers, a razor, matches and other objects famously banned from airplanes. Were you worried that they would overly color viewers’ readings of the piece?

That was definitely a “should this go in, should this not?” area, but I was interested in the question of “what can you bring with you?” For example, I lived in France for a while, and I would go to flea markets where there would always be [booths selling] people’s spectacles and watches. For me, it was very eerie. You know, “What can you take with you? What are valuables? And how do things become important?”

Actually, I am surprised by how people move to what is lighter or more joyful in Corner Plot because, for me, there is a balance of both [light and menacing imagery]. I mean, the piece is five feet below ground. There are tomb references I almost had to avoid when making it—so that it doesn’t become completely a grave.

In broader terms, what appeals to you about organic structures? Your installations tend to spread like vines over spaces, creeping along walls, around corners.

I’m interested in an object or an experience that seems like it’s in the middle of a process. So the idea of a sculpture growing out into the space is partially this idea of feeling like it’s a live experience.

The organic quality comes from imagining the behavior of a person: Part of the scale is always about the human scale—the scale of the hand, the scale of the mouth, the idea of things that we gather in daily life.

The everyday objects in your work do resemble the residue of someone’s life. When you work on a piece, to what degree do you imagine a narrative running through the mass of objects? Do you invent a kind of creator persona for each installation?

The real narratives are the ones that the viewer creates. I think this is true of most artwork: the decisions that are made [by an artist] have an intention to them, and just the fact that they have that intention is translated to the viewer. I definitely have narratives as I’m building, but they are not narratives that I’m trying to articulate literally.

That idea of the residue of someone’s life comes from a fascination with looking at locations and objects in the context of a sociological reading or an archaeological reading or a forensic type of reading, in which you’re trying to deduct “what was the behavior that was around this location?” An extreme example would be something like Pompeii, but you can see it recreated in smaller ways all the time when you travel.

I’ve always felt as if I’m investigating a space that is much more personal than an archaeological site when I look at your installations. Do you want your work to evoke an absent individual—even if it isn’t a literal portrait?

People often talk about domestic objects when my work is written about. But for me, it’s not necessarily about domestic things. I don’t use anything that is used—for the most part. Occasionally any of these rules I set for myself can be broken, but I try to make it so that you don’t have the romanticism of trash or of history in my work.

In my mind, the objects should be very easily replaced and generic in that way—just acquired, but not difficult to acquire necessarily. But I do like the idea that there is something intimate in the work. The objects feel owned.

Now that you’ve taken on Midtown, where else are you planning installations?

I am working on a project at U.C. Berkeley that is a permanent piece in a new building there, and right now I’m working on a piece for the Malmö Konsthall [in Sweden], which is going to be nice in the way that the permanent pieces are not. I’m going to make something that is completely impermanent. It’s a very large and beautiful space, and I’m going to deal with it in a very light-handed way. I’m looking forward to not having to think about weather and graffiti and skateboarders.

There is a different life to a work that is permanent. It’s an incredible thing to have something seen over time in the same context, but I don’t want to abandon making work that would never last longer than the show. It would maybe be installed somewhere else, but in a different way. I’m looking forward to making a piece that is very intuitive and made with an ability to tinker, and I don’t have to plan ahead too much—it’s really made in the moment.