On November 14, 2010 sculptor Konstantin Dimopoulos’ work and the wind whispered your name was unveiled at The Holocaust Memorial in Melbourne. It’s about memory and of course it’s this commitment to remembrance, in whatever form, the Jewish community has, to assure the world never forgets the atrocities of The Holocaust.

Now, you can sing a song about memory, write a poem or even throw up a firebrand dedication on Face Book. But you need a singer to sing it, a DJ to play it and you need to re-read that poem or Internet dedication ad nauseam for its memory to remain in the hearts of men.

Sadly that’s not guaranteed, but with a sculpture, once installed for the public to view, it’s hard to remove. Unless you’re prepared to besiege a parapet of recalcitrant bureaucrats with a canon paperwork and wait six months for a crane to cart it away.

That’s the power and beauty of a sculpture, if the message is a positive one. Or it’s malevolence, if it’s a love dedication to Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

Luckily Dimopoulos’ work is very positive because it’s a message for the world over, regardless of specific histories or a biased political point of view.

Dimopoulos’ main art-clarion concerns the environment and that if we do forget, then we will experience what the Ancient Gauls feared most of all, that the sky will most certainly fall on our heads.

And by Toutatis with the weather we’ve been having lately Asterix and his sculptor pal Obelix might end up being right.

So by sheer will, a little bit of paperwork and with the help from his efficient wife Adele, I managed to catch the mercurial movements of Dimopoulos, by phone, in a hotel room in Seattle, USA.

“I’m currently putting up a work here, that’s going to happen next year, but I’ve just put one up in Denver,” Dimopoulos said. “Then I’m heading down to put a work up in Palm Springs, and I’ve already got a work up in Boston.”

Some of these works are similar to and the wind whispered your name at the Jewish Museum, but usually on a much larger scale.

The Denver piece, pictured here, also uses a bulrush or beach grass effect made of thin rods moulded in polyurethane resin. These sculptures, it should be pointed out, only really come to life when the wind passes through the rods to manipulate their shape.

They also create a sound depending on how kind or brutal the local weather might be. The irony is plastic lasts longer than natural materials, which wouldn’t fair as well in the elements.

“There’s also another work, Blue Trees which is going up in Vancouver,” Dimopoulos added. Blue Tress is a selection of real fully-grown trees painted in a blue dye, which has in the past been met with some controversy.

Presumably because it might damage the trees, which is not the case as Dimopoulos explained, “the dye’s actually harmless and fades away eventually”.

“My concern with this work is about deforestation, particularly of old forests being decimated globally” Dimopoulos said, adding “basically it’s 61 million hectares every year, the size of Belgium…and as an artist, I wanted to see how I could help to raise these issues.”

These astounding statistics of course have been cited many times before. “Initially how I got the idea was through a picture I saw of these olive trees in Crete painted in white,” Dimopoulos said.

“The problem is, trees are often invisible in passing and there are two things you can do to make them truly visible, which is if they disappear completely or you paint them.”

But it’s hard to maintain the memory, what with media amnesia and a world always looking for the next story.

You can tell that Dimopoulos, like most, finds it frustrating that globalisation has saturated the world with so many issues, a lot of them contradicting each other, and that really a lot of the time it’s hard to see the woods for the trees.

So, he admirably cut to the chase, saying, “look, most people are driven partially by ego, as I am. Hopefully I will leave the world with something, even if it’s just more trees.”