All experience happens within the living body. The memories we recall are stimulated by associations made in that lived present and often triggered by the same random combination of stimuli that generates new memory and so resonates with a cyclical determinance. Our social experience is typified by expectations that are most memorable when these expectations are surpassed by behavior and fate. It is these proposed truisms that I endeavor to relate in visual form.

Each moment our bodies are shaping themselves. On a quantum, molecular and muscular level we are changing. Symbolically the hourglass guided my abstraction of the human figure. Swooping tubes delineate the flowing gestures of a figure skater just as they symbolize the rise and fall of time through the portal of the hourglass’s center. The circuitous tubes easily reference the tracing of skates. Exciting performances that champion athletic skill and call audiences to celebrate the creativity of cultural excellence are reflected in the compositions triumphal dynamic. The essence Victoria’s garden culture is referenced in the flower petal gestures of the loops as well as their soft line quality. This work is an eccentric Triquetra that rises and replicates itself into three dimensions. At a height of forty feet vehicular traffic will see a rapidly altering composition elegantly viewable from all sides while plaza movement can flow directly into and through a sculpture of breathtaking scale.

[This proposal was too ambitious for the budget and had to be simplified. Emanation was the result of these adaptations. I felt the rich red of rusted steel would be appropriate with the direction the architect was going with the exterior finish. I was assured that it would not be a detriment if I included more glass, which was something I had resisted in Skater for two reasons. I had been cautious because I felt that city powers would be hostile to much glass even if it was tempered, and the zipper-like placement of the panels might be too much of a temptation to climb if they extended around the tubes to the ground. As I developed Emanation the composition became more serene and it became clear to me how to really increase the volume of glass. It was an expanded surface to more fully explore the graphic possibilities of the gold leafing and more effectively contrast the tubular arabesques. I submitted Emanation to the jury and it was not accepted, nor was it to be shown publicly]

Public art is an opportunity to make large sculpture. I want to transform an area, not reference what is already there although the site itself is always very suggestive. I find it evokes very definite compositions and materials. The emotional state of my models is a reply to, and an adjustment of, that human space.

The emotional element is always such a problem in communication; I can’t blame people for the trend in historic referencing and wordy installations. So inoffensive! So impersonal! But really, who’s an unequivocal fan of public art? It makes everyone cringe sometime in his or her lives. For instance, in Ottawa when I was a child, a huge brown fiberglass tube was installed. It was titled Traffic, and it was a gargantuan loop which humped over an imaginary obstruction part of the way down it’s racetrack length. It remains just so, but enlivened by engraved scrawls of graffiti. It’s famously reviled as ‘the worm’. The last time I visited my hometown I wanted to hug this unloved beast that is linked for me to another closed loop composition of a completely opposite effect.

While I worked in Carrara, Noguchi was finishing off a big white marble slide. It’s silhouette couldn’t help but evoke Breugel’s painting of the tower of Babel. It had a staircase leading right into it like a secret escape tunnel. It led you upward through the single block of stone, a clean-cut spiraling rise. Inside this chamber the air was distinctly cooler than in the hot Italian sun, streaming in from above. Almost immediately you found yourself the king of the castle surveying the outer area perched atop a deliciously smooth slide around the perimeter of the form you had just ascended. As if it was the most splendid toy, I wanted it for myself alone. I later saw a photo of a black granite version. I don’t know where these pieces are installed but I know they were designed as public art works.

Of course it wouldn’t matter where you plunked the Noguchis. The site would become as wonderful as the worm had made it’s site, specifically memorable.