OUT OF THE EARTH
THE WAVE FIELDS
This series allowed me to study both the formal and experiential qualities of ocean wave formations.
The Wave Field (1995), the first in the series, was based on a naturally occurring water wave called a Stokes wave. With repetitive, cupped waves ranging in scale from three to five feet in height, the work is 10,000 square feet in size (100 x 100 feet) and is situated in the interior courtyard of the FXB aerospace and engineering building at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The second, Flutter (2005), installed at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami, Florida, was modeled after the shallow ripple formations that are created in sand by wave action. Each row formed a continuous wave pattern, with the height fluctuating from two to three feet and an overall size of 30,000 square feet. Storm King Wavefield (2009), installed at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, includes waves that rise to a height of eighteen feet. Originally the work was to encompass approximately 90,000 square feet, but when working directly on-site, I chose to increase the scale of the piece to four acres to fit the scale of the site.
The scale of each work tripled in size from 10,000 to 30,000 to 90,000 square feet and changed shape and form as the heights of the waves allowed me to study three very different scales in wave formation, from shallow ones of two to three feet high, to human-scale ones four to five feet in height, and finally to waves that rise to almost eighteen feet.
EARTH DRAWINGS
The Earth Drawings is a series of earthwork installations in which I explored the experiential and gestural presence of the drawn line: how much personality a single line drawing has, why one line can look modern, another historical. With each drawing I was fascinated by how much a single mark can become so expressive of a certain time or character. Also I was interested in expressing drawings in three-dimensional space and experiencing each as a walk. These drawings were equally inspired by the ancient burial mounds in the southeastern Ohio region where I grew up.
WIRE LANDSCAPES
These works started with a series of small three-dimensional drawings I was making in wire, based on how a computer sees terrain, by creating an x-y grid and then a perspective drawing of that topography. The ambiguity and tension created between the physical form of the sculpture and the shadows it creates on the wall behind it merge two- and three-dimensional form. These works were imagined landscapes as well as based on actual terrain.