Selected as Finalist for the Interior Student Commons of the UAA Engineering and Industry Building JANUARY, 2015
Field Effect
My art design for the wall in the Student Commons of the UAA Engineering and Industry Building suggests material qualities at the microscopic scale since these properties are often affected at very cold temperatures. Field Effect is inspired by the structure of carbon in graphene.
The title and the form of the sculpture suggest a field in nature that has been translated into repeated geometries with the kind of mathematical precision that is at the heart of engineering. The color and luminosity are meant to suggest the northern lights, the Aurora Borealis. The pattern of the colored glass would be linked to the colors of the lights in the sky.
A wave form sweeps across the plane of the wall suggesting the inherent energy in all material. A half an inch thick aluminum plate cut into an hexagonal lattice is anchored to the wall an inch in front of the wall plane so multiple shadows of the lattice are cast on the wall by overhead lights. Attached to this lattice are 672 half inch diameter aluminum posts of varying lengths. Each of these has a bearing at its outer end to which a hexagonal piece of laminated dichroic glass is attached. The angle of the glass is adjusted and then fixed into a final position that describes the curving plane of the sculpture’s surface.
