Blade
Blade is a public art sculpture, proposed and executed in response to a call for entries by the City of Iowa City for the Peninsula Park Sculptor’s Showcase. (BladeProposal.pdf – requires Adobe Acrobat reader.)
The gradually sloping floodplain that descends to a gentle curve in the river at Peninsula Park bespeaks a narrative of land-history. Standing at the site of the sculpture pad, it is easy to imagine a time before ours, when indigenous people may have walked these very banks, and before even this, in a geographic time scale far beyond our comprehension, when it was just the land. As I thought about the sculpture that would be appropriate for this site, it seemed imperative to me that it be tied to this idea of land-history.
Blade was conceived as a site-specific sculpture, as a response to the particular location where it was to reside. This response, the aesthetic experience that results in artwork creation, is not a singularity and does not necessarily follow rational thought patterns. The gestalt of this experience often cannot be satisfactorily verbalized. As I visited the site prior to developing my idea for the sculpture, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of land history. The ground beneath my feet felt timeless and the wind against my face spoke with non-verbal eloquence. I was rooted and aware of a vast time-scale extending beyond comprehension. The major impetus for the formal aspects of Blade became an attempt to mark this experience.
One aspect of my response to the site concerned the visual harmony of the natural environment surrounding the sculpture pad. There was an economy of expression in which everything worked together. Nothing was superfluous and nothing was wasted. This led me to contemplation of the effect of regional environment on form. The prairie ecology favors a particular plant-form, prairie grass. It is a perfect adaptation of form to environment. And as I considered this further, I thought about the people who have settled in this environment. Whether here by choice or circumstance, they nevertheless are subject to the same natural forces, and these forces seem to mold identifiable Iowan characteristics: resilience, flexibility and strong rootedness. In creating the basic form of Blade I attempted to reference all of these ideas. And finally, in a very personal response to this particular space and time, Blade is a bit of a love poem, or homage, to the state of mind it has induced in me. So site-specificity as it relates to Blade, encompasses a subjective reaction to a particular space and time. Its conception, in fact, became inseparable from this particular space and time.