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| "The Wave Field," 1995. Shaped earth; 100 x 100 feet. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan |
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“The Wave Field”
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"The Wave Field" is a
series of fifty grass
waves in eight
rows, covering approximately 10,000 square feet of a college
campus. A combination of soil and sand, the field is blanketed with
a verdant sod that makes the uniquely manicured lawn a luxurious
place for relaxing, studying, or playing. People can often be found
nestled within the comfortable dip of a wave or perched on a crest
where the piece can be surveyed as a whole. Located alongside the
François-Xavier Bagnoud building for aerospace engineering
- named so for a graduate of the program who died in a helicopter
accident in the Mali desert in 1986 - "The Wave Field" is a work
rich with many references: from the geographic to the art historical,
from the scientific to the autobiographical. And yet, while the
work is built from an intricate network of stories and references,
there are few if any prerequisites necessary for appreciating the
humor and unpretentious beauty "The Wave Field." As with the majority
of Lin's pieces, the work has a life that is sensuous before it
is verbal. Only after sinking into the curve of a wave or appreciating
the undulating line of the horizon does one begin to ask questions
or make associations to a world of ideas beyond the work.
Rarely riding on the surface, all of Maya Lin's works possess undercurrents of personal associations. Born in Ohio but raised by parents who immigrated from China to the United States only a year before her birth, Lin's work speaks of an Asian family aesthetic nurtured in a displaced, Midwestern context. The rhythm of the waves is reminiscent of Chinese paintings from the Song Dynasty (960-1126) as well as Japanese woodcuts from the Nineteenth Century, and yet the use of earth and grass to make forms finds its precedent in the Ohio Hopewell burial mounds of the artist's childhood geography. Precedents for the work also exist in contemporary art history with large earthworks by artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and James Turrell - all cited by Lin as deeply influential to her sense of scale and interest in geologic time.
But it is the artist's interest in the sciences that generated the
initial image for "The Wave Field." While researching the disciplines
of aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, Lin stumbled upon an image
of the Stokes wave: a naturally occurring phenomenon on the open
sea. Intrigued by the way in which science has afforded unprecedented
views of the universe - from satellite images of the polar ice caps
and the lunar surface to the split-second photograph of a splash
of water - the artist set about transforming what was once liquid
and in flux into a permanent fixture of the landlocked, Midwestern
landscape. That the grassy waves also resemble the expansive sandy
hills of a windswept desert is a poetry that resonates with the
occasion for the work: to commemorate a valued alumnus of the school
whose aircraft crashed in the African desert. That the work in its
final form inspires discovery, play, and joy amongst children who
roll down its three foot crests ties the work to a larger operating
metaphor: out of tragedy and loss can come life and celebration.
A concept as inextricably bound to Eastern philosophy as it is to
the principles of thermal dynamics, "The Wave Field" - as an inherently
social work - demonstrates that out of destruction can come creation
and the possibility for renewal. |
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