| ART:21: |
What was the initial concept
you had in mind for the Grand Rapids park project. What was
in your mind's eye?
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| LIN: |
It's funny, whenever I start,
I have no idea why I end up creating each of these site-specific
works. I think atypical is that you might look at "Eclipse
Time," you might then go visit the "Wave Field" or "Ground
Swell" or even what's going on in Grand Rapids, and materialistically
and formally,
they're very different. The mediums I use range widely, from
broken glass to water to granite. And I think formalistically,
each time out with these large scale
works, they can look very different. But there are some very
strong underlying ideas that go throughout the works. One
of them is time, one of them is an idea about landscape and
the earth, or natural states or phenomena. So I think for
me, Grand Rapids is also very contextually
site-specific; it's not just a reaction to a physical site,
it's the cultural site.
So with the "Wave Field" in Michigan, it was for an aerospace
engineering building and I had no idea what I was going to
do. My site could have been in the building they were building
or outside. And I just read up on aerospace and flight for
three months and then came up with the idea of the "Wave Field,"
which is basically a book image of a natural occurring water
wave that came about because flight requires resistance, and
that led to turbulence studies, which led to fluid dynamics.
For Grand Rapids, I think I started thinking about the city
and its proximity. It's two blocks away from the river that
gave it its name. The Army core of engineers broke the rapids,
so that the city would stop flooding, and I just started thinking
in the back of my head about water, and I think I have used
water in many of my pieces, and when I'm not using water,
like the "Wave Field," it's a recreation of a water wave.
"Ground Swell" - the definition of ground swell is the beginning
swell in the ocean before it makes a wave. And the color of
the glass...I deliberately mixed two colors to get a color
like water. So for Grand Rapids, I just started with an intuition
and I started playing with it. I'd actually started with frozen
waves of earth, kind of taking where I left off with "Wave
Field," and that grew into an early plastacene model that
deals with water fountains, one liquid, one gas, one vapor.
The ice skating rink, which I always knew was going to be
a large physical part of the site, I knew would become my
focal point. So that's probably what I would say is the initial
underground, subconscious ideas I might be toying with. I
don't think you can say "because of this I did this, because
of this I did that." I think art is wonderful because it's
everything you've ever known and everything you've ever done,
somehow percolating up, working with ideas that you might
want to explore. And then you can just wake up one morning
and know what you want to do. The hissing of the heat.
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| ART:21: |
How much were you influenced
by the Ohio mound-builder culture?
|
| LIN: |
I think they were always there.
There were school trips... I think there are a few things
dealing with landscape that have been a very strong influence
on my work. One of them is my whole southeastern Ohio topography.
There were these ancient mounds built, earth mounds, effigies.
Some were ones called the "Serpent Mound" - it is this beautiful
snake. Others were just whole cities, burial mounds. And the
Hopewell Adena Indians made these and left these two to three
thousand years ago. Some are still standing. They're in cow
pastures, corn fields. As a child, you knew they were there.
They'd show up in someone's corn field. But oddly enough,
I think influential on me was the landscape itself in southeastern
Ohio. When everyone thinks of Ohio and they think Northern,
they think Cleveland. It is incredibly hilly and right where
I grew up the landscape is just undulates beautifully. And
you really do have a sense always of that ground plain rising
up and rolling. It's the rolling hills, and they're quite,
quite luscious and quite beautiful. But as important would
probably be the fact that my dad was a potter and my brother
and I, after school because we were at the university lab
school - we'd get out of school at three and we'd have two
hours in my dad's pottery studio
to wait before he was ready to go home. So just days, hours
spent, playing with clay. And I think I would say that so
much of my work deals with the plastic medium of clay. Water,
again, is a very plastic, fluid medium. My childhood is the
60s, and the notion of what plastic, fluid, design
shapes were beginning to originate out of there, again, plays
into the back of your head. But I think for me it was probably
my father's potting that I would watch. That's something I
really, really played with as a child and was probably more
of an influence.
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| ART:21: |
Are there other material influences?
|
| LIN: |
No, it should be the elements.
Why do some materials interest me more than others? Water
is an amazing element because it can occur in three states.
It can be a solid (ice), a liquid, or it can be a gas (steam).
And, again going back to science, it's probably why I wanted
to become a scientist early on. The ability for water to transform
or transmute itself, the fact that it can constantly be in
flux as to what it is, is probably why I'm drawn to it. So
that the Grand Rapid park uses ice, vapor and liquid, so water
in all its three stages, is absolutely the core idea behind
that piece. |
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