[upbeat music] (female announcer) This program is made possible in part by... ...for making meaning in his work using the earth as his studio; by the Lenoir Tourism Development Authority-- tucked away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Lenoir, North Carolina, has a rich heritage of crafts and sculpture, including work by Thomas Sayre... ...and by the Lucy Daniels Foundation, proud to support the creativity of all artists, especially Thomas Sayre... ...with additional funding from the... ...and the... [echoing guitars playing overlapping melodies] ♪ (man) "Earthcastings" are really a casting of a pretty ephemeral moment.

♪ [violins support guitar melodies] One of the big metaphors and/or ideas of earthcasting is this balance of human invention and-- and human effort and human artifice in balance with the grain of nature and the structure of nature and the patterns of nature.

(man #2) I think it's a reconnection to nature we all need to be reconnected to.

(woman) And his artwork is wholly original.

♪ (man #3) This sorta intensely personal pursuit of everything that he does and really not stopping till he's achieved excellence.

(woman #2) The larger than lifeness, I think, is the key because not many people can make really big things.

(man #4) Thomas has a real ability to connect with stories of place that are meaningful to people.

(man #1) I'm making art in concert with forces that are much bigger than me.

[strings lead swelling orchestration] ♪ [twangy guitar leads lazy blues tune] ♪ (man) My name is Thomas Sayre, and I'm a maker.

♪ What I make is primarily sculptures, usually and often with a technique called earthcasting, although I do other things as well.

I came to North Carolina temporarily to go to college, and to my amazement, I've been here almost ever since.

I live and work in downtown Raleigh in an old warehouse, but I travel all over the world to make art.

[resonant string arrangement] ♪ Somewhere along the line fairly early, I encountered Wallace Stevens' poem about the jar in Tennessee where he sees this fragment of a piece of pottery while-- So he's looking at-- at this beautiful view of the Appalachians in Tennessee somewhere, and his eyesight goes down.

He sees this bit of manmadeness, of humanness, and he looks back at the view, and it's somehow changed.

♪ (woman reading "Anecdote of the Jar") "I placed a jar in Tennessee "And round it was, upon a hill.

"It made the slovenly wilderness "Surround that hill.

"The wilderness rose up to it, "And sprawled around, no longer wild.

"The jar was round upon the ground "And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere."

♪ (Thomas) And in many ways, that's what I've wanted to do, is make that piece of pottery that changes landscape but doesn't take it over or doesn't dominate.

[bulldozer rattling] It looks a whole lot more like construction than the kind of 19th-century image of an artist with a palette and a beret and-- and all that.

The term earthcasting is using Mother Earth, and in North Carolina is-- is our great red-orange soil that is clayey.

So it's using that to make a mold by digging with backhoes and shovels and picks.

And we fashion a form and then fill that void, that trench, if you will, with reinforced, fairly technical reinforced steel, uh, concrete, uh.

And then we pull it out and stand it up against Father Sky, and that's, in a nutshell, what an earthcasting is.

[placid plucked cello tune] (man) Twenty years ago had met Thomas Sayre, and he was very excited about his new process of embedding materials in the ground and raising up the red clay of North Carolina and creating these monumental sculptures.

Well, it just clicked with me.

I said, "This is right.

This is what we need to do first in the park."

The park is about public engagement, public collaboration.

Every project has to connect art to nature.

And the glorious thing is that today, I can watch people interacting with that piece.

They love it!

I think it's one of the most photographed works in the museum's collection.

People go there all the time.

They're excited about it.

It's about schoolkids.

It's about groups of people.

It becomes a center for social interaction.

It becomes a place where people play, and I think that's very important.

I'm sure Thomas intended it to be something that invites spontaneity.

And everybody responds with their own spirit, uh, to what that piece means to them and how they want to interact with it.

(woman) 2-D or 3-D?

(children) 3-D. (woman) And what's the term we talked about?

(children) In the round.

(woman) And what does that mean?

(children) You can see all around.

(woman) For a lot of them, this is the first venture out to a museum.

I did hear a lot of different comments as they were coming through, like references to motorcycles and all kinds of interesting things like that.

(man) I love his earthcastings.

They're just spectacular pieces that come out of the ground, and if you're in one direction coming at 'em, you see one thing, and from another direction they look completely different.

And we ride our bikes through the three of 'em every Sunday when we're out riding just for good luck.

(man) Among the things that are interesting to me is the three-- the sense of completeness that three creates, the sense of three as passages, early, middle, and late.

So there are a number of ways in which we could see some aspect of our lives reflected, and then I think also the intersection or the transection, the fact that the sculpture crosses the road.

Art and life meet.

♪ (woman) You see these clods of earth on the casting, but it's-- you don't see the process, which I think is part of what's so fundamental about earthcastings, is this process.

(Thomas) And so what we're proposing is this colonnade, and this is only half of it.

The other half is here.

And the proscenium is right here, and then the audience is up here.

And so where the audience is in this scheme and where the actors are is ambiguous, and-- but most of all, it's a place to be.

I mean, classes could happen out here, or performances could happen 'cause it's really great space to be in, the way these arches, um, sort of foreshorten up on each other, and it becomes this-- almost like a cathedral.

It's really cool.

tink, tink, tink So this is a lot easier than the real thing.

Dome of this... 30,000 pounds or so.

[clattering] Death and destruction.

So I made these when it was snowing, and everybody was crashing all around.

I could hear sliding and tires going zzz, zzz, zzz, and I was in here with my woodstove, playing in the mud.

It was delightful.

So this looks like the fields of Verdun.

And I think of Warren Zevon's song.

♪ I heard Woodrow Wilson's guns ♪ [flute melody introduces Warren Zevon's "Veracruz"] It's amazing... ♪ how telegraphic dirt can be.

[bass supports] ♪ [Zevon] ♪ I heard Woodrow Wilson's guns ♪ ♪ I heard Maria cryin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Late last night I heard the news ♪ ♪ That Veracruz was dyin' ♪ [guitar and flutes lead] ♪ So that looks pretty good.

♪ (man) Thomas Sayre-- the first time I met him, I was immediately struck by the physical resemblance to his great-grandfather.

You can't swim against the gene pool, I'm afraid.

It's a very strong current, and I immediately felt a kind of, um, strength of character.

I also felt a great kindness and sensitivity about him, um.

I--I felt, again, like Woodrow Wilson, a--a-- a great listener, uh, somebody who absorbs a great deal.

(male announcer) The United States entered World War I on April 6th, 1917.

A blindfolded President Woodrow Wilson picked the first draft number.

The U.S. had not fought a major war in 50 years.

For American boys, many from small towns, it was the end of innocence and some of the bloodiest fighting the world has ever seen.

[gunfire and explosions] [sustained guitar harmonies] [machine noise] ♪ [beeping] ♪ (Thomas) You know, we started out 97 degrees [chucking] and rock-hard ground.

I mean, it was-- it was like the Gobi Desert--heh!

Looks like we didn't cut down quick enough.

That's why.

(Thomas, voice-over) Some of my guys were not happy about it, and I don't blame 'em.

One of 'em passed out.

[violins support sustained harmonies] The way earthcasting works is, you get as crisp as you can, [chuckling] and it's still unmistakably an earthcasting.

The earth pushes back.

It always does.

So we dug 'em, all eight, in very varying dirt.

[chuckling] Ricky is like a--a rock, that which he doesn't like to hit when he's digging.

He's quiet and calm and just wants to do the best job that he can do for the piece.

As he says to me all the time, "We gotta do it right.

This thing's gonna be there for a long time."

And he believes deeply in that and knows his role in that.

He's makin' a lot of the marks.

Once the hole's opens, it dries out.

It cracks.

All kinds of stuff happens, um.

When the steel goes in, it hits the wall.

Art is the result, in my view, of making.

And so how you make has everything to do with what you make, what comes out at the other end that people then go to and sometimes call art.

[off-screen] That is beautiful.

[voice-over] There's something about the-- the baking sun which baked the dirt, which was OK, but it baked us.

And it had the effect of sucking some of the joy out of it.

Ninety-seven degrees, ten-hour days-- that's a lot.

I still get in the durn hole, and come that evening, I can feel it in my bones.

Don't want no rain.

And then it started raining.

The good news is, it got cooler, but it started raining, and the site got squishy.

This is just part of the--the earthcasting, I mean, is the water.

What we have to have is the right coverage.

The look, within limits, is what it is.

Just like that's different from that because the soil was different.

Yeah.

[sloshing] (Thomas, voice-over) And two of 'em filled up with water.

Since this one's so much harder dirt, it didn't get that damaged.

We can pour this one tomorrow.

We can pour this one tomorrow.

So we'll prep this one, finish preppin' that one, and we'll at least get two.

[sighing] I'd sure like to get three... but this one's real mucky.

♪ If the sun comes out-- this is first time I've wanted the sun to come out, [chuckling] that's for sure.

And one of them was so tightly compacted that the water didn't really affect the mold much at all.

And we had great teeth marks, and they survived, and the other one was like soup.

So with our hands, we cleaned out all the grooves, and I don't know what that one's gonna look like.

♪ [strings lead energetic orchestration] ♪ [brass fanfare introduces march] ♪ My father-- we went to Union Seminary in New York City and then right out of that was, uh, enlisted in the Navy as an officer, went back to the Pacific and saw action.

He was this young minister who was also a medic during times of attack, and-- but he held services, and I think that hadn't happened on that ship.

[woodwinds lead tranquil orchestration] After the war, the two parents met.

♪ It was pretty much love at first sight.

♪ They were married within a year in my mother's homeplace in Sharon, Connecticut.

And soon thereafter, they moved to Cleveland, Ohio.

I was born there.

[lively strings join orchestration] And then he got the call to be dean of Washington Cathedral, which was a third complete, and from what I remember and can tell, kind of broke and was languishing.

♪ They started construction during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and then at some point ran out of money.

And World War II came along, and so my father started up the construction again and had to raise a bunch of money.

So the apse and the north transept was done, and about a third of the nave, but with a temporary ceiling, and same with the south transept had a temporary ceiling 'cause of the vaulting wasn't really complete.

(man) So what was the inside of this wall?

Was it just visible studs?

(Thomas) It was, like, plywood, painted.

It was very crude.

(man) Assuming you scrambled up with electricians and watched them wire things up?

(Thomas) Yes, up in the-- the triforium is that space, right?

(Craig) Correct.

(Thomas) And this is what gives real meaning to the Latin word nave the word nave comes from 'cause that means "ship," and you can really see, vividly, the ribs that looks just like the bottom of a ship.

And then you can see the top of the keystones called bosses.

And of course the buttresses that are outside of these walls push back in, and the finials on top of them give them enough weight they don't push out.

And it's all a wonderful system, and you really can see how it all works.

Fifty-two bells lofted above us, swirling around-- the little guys, the big guy.

There's a lot of sound right here, [chuckling] a lot of metal.

So, ironically, I'm making now a sculpture that depicts the-- the acoustics, if you will, of a bell [chuckling] for a project called, uh, Bell View.

And what I didn't know-- as a kid, I used to do this.

[low ring] Oops, that was a little loud.

heh And what's happening is, there's six overtones.

[The Chordettes' vocalized introduction to "Mr. Sandman"] ♪ Bom, bom, bom, bom bom, bom, bom, bom ♪ ♪ Bom, bom, bom, bom ♪ ♪ Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream ♪ [solo] ♪ Bom, bom, bom, bom ♪ [in unison] ♪ Make him the cutest that I've ever seen ♪ [solo] ♪ Bom, bom, bom, bom ♪ [in unison] ♪ Give him two lips like roses in clover ♪ [solo] ♪ Bom, bom, bom, bom ♪ [in unison] ♪ Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over ♪ ♪ Sandman ♪ (Thomas) I have two sisters and two brothers.

My older brother is my Thai brother.

He lived with us for 18 years, and we all grew up on the grounds of Washington Cathedral, which was a very public place, but also a very private place for us.

[violins lead lively orchestration] ♪ (woman) It was under construction the whole time we were growing up there.

Our father was dean for over a quarter of a century.

♪ We lived in the deanery.

That was our house right next to the apse of the cathedral.

And it was being built by master craftsmen and artists who were the best in their professions at the peak of their careers, making, slowly and carefully, really beautiful things out of limestone and out of needlepoint and stained glass and marble and wood.

(woman) It was like a medieval life of being in a village creating something, the excitement of our father when he would come in and tell us what was going on or describe something he'd seen.

The stone-carvers, the wood-carvers, the tapestry makers-- they were all around us all the time, uh.

My father, you know, one of the highlights of his year would be going to dinner with all the stone-carvers.

♪ (man) He loved the crafts.

He loved the arts.

This cathedral is being built, and he would have been as happy as he could be workin' all day, laying stone.

But every time he had a chance, he was goin' and seein' and knowin' the carvers, who was like the United Nations-- multitude of languages, but they spoke a common language of stone.

♪ (man) The whole ground was covered with stones-- precut stone pieces ready to go up.

So it was stones everywhere, and it was a great playground to run around those stones-- limestone block, beautifully cut.

(Happy) It was a wonderful backyard for a kid.

We had the run of the place, could ride our bikes, go anywhere, top of the highest hill in Washington.

And we lived on 52 acres of sort of parkland and open spaces in the middle of the city, a lovely place dominated by this amazing cathedral.

♪ [twangy guitar leads lazy blues tune] ♪ (Thomas) There's a whole dynamic-- especially in essence living together.

We lived in the same house and one bathroom, and it was pretty intimate.

And everybody has their own rhythms.

I need to finish the dirt... near the lug.

[voice-over] It is part of my job to try as best I can to orchestrate all the needs and say, yep, I'm afraid we're gonna have to get up at 5:30.

♪ Great day.

♪ Here comes our friend the sun.

♪ [voice-over] You know, it's a different, very different, um, vibe and myth from the-- the lone artist hero in the grotto somewhere, in the back room, in the-- in the cave, um.

This is group, and a disparate group at that.

[off-screen] Color for the concrete, drawings.

This is a good one: construction administration.

uh-huh Are you bringing a shovel?

[machine noise] (man) Well, they're drilling a circle at different elevations-- every other hole's a different elevation all the way around-- to pour their concrete in and set up their form usin' the dirt as their form.

(Thomas) Ricky, Blaine, and Christian and Brian and Huts-- they all gave a lot of themselves, their bodies, their spirits.

It's not easy to be out there for 12 hours a day.

[off-screen] So, I'm afraid of this thing getting to be honkin'.

Wait, wait.

We need to pause on this.

(man) These kinds of projects that take a lot of human endeavor and a lot of human effort to make, and to have that be represented in such a beautiful way and-- and yet keep that sense of craft and making-- It's strong; it's bold.

It will be seen by people both driving past as well as the patrons who come here and use transit on a daily basis all year-round, through all the weathers and the seasons.

And also this sort of-- the real place-making that the pieces will create for not only the station itself and the park and ride that will be here, but also a real tribute and a remembrance to the history of the site as well as to the man-made and yet the natural environment and resources that are here.

[beeping] (woman) We, uh--we poured red concrete and made a clay mold, bunch of structural rebar.

We had quite the experience today.

(Thomas) I don't know that any artist ever controls everything.

I very much don't wanna control everything 'cause one doesn't in life.

But just like in regular life, um, that lack of control can-- can get to you.

Things happen that are tragic and painful and difficult.

And even the most well-rehearsed earthcasting, uh, there are enormous challenges.

[off-screen] We gotta pick up the pace here, guys.

(Hailey) We came up a little bit short on mud, so we had to do a little bit of improvising, a little bit of "take from here; place there."

(Michelle) Concrete being what it is, it sets up.

It has its own life.

And so here we are with all of these masons, finishers, Thomas's crew doing the final stamping.

And, you know, it looked like we were gonna be short, and yet we had maybe one shovel left--hah!

(Thomas) You know, when that concrete did what it did, the stress was huge.

I ain't ever doing this [beep] again.

[lively bluegrass tune] I mean, to have done those two pieces in eight days is really quite extraordinary, and I find some added energy in that.

It's kind of a feat.

It's like running a marathon.

(Michelle) From his North Carolina background, the minute they started playing, he was just on fire.

♪ (man over P.A.)

Nice dancin'!

[cheering and applause] (Thomas) I hated elementary school.

What no one knew at the time was that I, apparently, was very dyslexic, and I just didn't get it.

So fourth grade, I went-- there was a meeting that I heard about that my mother reported to me, where she went to the administration of St. Alban's School for Boys.

I can just imagine the meeting, with the administrator saying, "Well, you know, Mrs. Sayre, "we're not sure St. Alban's is for young Tom," I was then called.

But I remember her coming home and saying, "Well, we're thinking that maybe there's another school, and it's called the Potomac School," which is now a very fancy school, but at the time, it had a up-and-coming remedial reading teacher who was a--a real-- had apparently studied with the dyslexia gurus in Britain.

The, um, school was trying to attract boys.

So frankly, they took anything they could get.

And there were-- was rather a nasty, inconsiderate, and not very sensitive group.

And of course, as a minister's son, you know, you'd be a target anyway, and, um, so he was basically bullied at school there.

It was not-- it was not a happy experience.

So they had a bunch of-- heh--academic losers like me, and then they had some, looking back on it, I would say, discipline problems.

And so here I was in this Potomac School, Diana King and I--heh!

And I before E except after C except when sounds like A as in neighbor and weigh, and I learned those little devices, and, um-- and it-- I learned how to read.

He was reading-- not marvelously, but he could read.

The writing and spelling was another thing.

I remember I before E except after C... Oh, that one.

...or when sounds like A as in neighbor and weigh.

One of the more useless rules.

(Frances Sayre) When the astronauts of Apollo 11 and the brave men who followed on succeeding missions to the moon brought back some chunks of lunar material, it was not just rock that they returned to earth, but in an exciting way, the very horizon of eternity.

(Thomas) My father's power came from his lineage, and I think he was raised to matter.

Part of it is the call that he did have to become a minister, you know, a-- a man of the cloth, in the way he could effectively deal with a huge range of people, from kings and Presidents and senators to the guys mixing the mortar at the cathedral.

Have you put the Glenium in?

So concrete is just a wonderful material that's fairly inexpensive.

If you know how to work it, it can be very strong.

You can color it, uh.

It's real common, uh, and I liked that, and I started down the path of learning how to use it.

Some of that was learning about construction, you know, for buildings, um, and then I started making molds.

And--and the conventional approach to concrete is contain it as rigidly as you can and control everything about it, um.

And--and so plywood molds are used and--and, uh-- and lots of bracing and so that it's really rigid.

The thing about concrete is that at 150 pounds a cubic foot-- so a yard of concrete, which isn't all that big, is over 4,000 pounds.

When you pour it in its liquid state into a mold, those-- the molds can be torn apart by that internal, lateral outward pressure.

And I started to learn that when you don't control--heh-- and make it rigid and make it so it doesn't move, there were some interesting results that I-- that felt good to me, felt in the sense of, it was the beginning-- maybe not the beginning, but it was step along the path of being in control but not or making friends out of the physics involved in big weight and letting the serendipitous aspects of making anything be a friend, not a foe, and a sort of invited collaborator.

We set the grades, and then they-- they pour it out and-- wshhh!

And so they're not used to then [chuckling] having that surface completely screwed up by first pounding rocks into it and then dirt four inches thick and then throwing big rocks with some force.

So tell me what's the difference in-- in you pouring it in the ground and pouring it in a form?

It's where the hand of man meets the hand of God.

And that's what you want?

Yeah.

So you'd look over in that hole there and see all those rocks.

That's controlled chaos.

Control-- heh, heh...heh!

[back-up alarm beeping] [mandolin introduces bluegrass tune] ♪ (male vocalist) ♪ It's all right to take your time ♪ ♪ I think I'll carry mine ♪ ♪ Down by the river's edge ♪ ♪ Just another way to go ♪ ♪ More of them apples, please ♪ ♪ You just gotta throw them seeds ♪ ♪ Down by the river's edge ♪ ♪ Just another way to go ♪ ♪ It's all right to go away ♪ ♪ Nothing here to stay ♪ ♪ Down by the river's edge ♪ ♪ Just another way to go ♪ [mandolin improvisation] ♪ [banjo improvisation] ♪ ♪ Has to be hard to hold the line ♪ ♪ All we really got is time ♪ ♪ Down by the river's edge ♪ ♪ Just another way to go ♪ ♪ Hot sand 'tween my toes ♪ ♪ Skippin' stones where they go ♪ I don't see any cracks.

♪ Just another way to go ♪ ♪ [guitar improvisation] ♪ Damn good.

♪ It's all right to take your time ♪ ♪ I think I'll carry mine ♪ ♪ Down by the river's edge ♪ ♪ Just another way ♪ [guitar echoes vocal melody] ♪ It's just another way to go ♪ I'm ready to make another one.

[placid plucked cello tune] ♪ ♪ And then I remember the decision to not complete the nave but to build the tower and let it stick up on the skyline.

And it was a tough decision, and Pop advocated, "We need to be the beacon.

We need to have the symbol, and then the rest will come," and it did.

♪ So as I grew, the cathedral grew.

I mean, I grew with it, and I remember the tower and all the view you could get from it.

I was about 12 when this lead roof was being put by hand.

This crimp, this sanding seam was made by hand with little crimpers.

And it ran long, and they snipped off the lead.

It's eight of an inch thick.

I was, at the time, casting lead soldiers by melting lead on the family stove.

Can you imagine?

heh, heh Lead at the-- at the hobby shop was very expensive.

I would come up here and find all the leavings in a bag, in a-- in a pack, and I would climb back down the scaffolding, go home, and melt the lead and make little lead soldiers, which, arguably--heh, heh-- in some ways, was my first sculptures.

♪ Martin Luther King came and preached, and we had guards around our house, and the act of him preaching was an act of leadership.

And this is where King came after preaching, uh.

Lunch was served in there, and there were enough people-- not a lot, but enough to fill this room, so we didn't sit at the table.

And Dr. King sat right there, and I sat right there.

And I remember quite unmistakably, he looked and acted and felt tired, like, to the bone.

(Martin Luther King, Jr.) With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope.

With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

♪ So King preached on Sunday, had dinner at our house right there, and went back to Memphis and was killed on Thursday.

And the following Saturday, this scene, this sort of section of the horizon, was on fire, and my father and I and several others went up the tower, and we were just speechless.

♪ [motor humming] Pipe wrench, please.

Better.

[voice-over] The, um, hooking on was perfect.

We had to put 3,000 more extra pounds of pull beyond the actual weight to break the suction, and at one point, I could hear it.

I could hear something kind of--fwit.

(man) There it is.

(Thomas) And they came up.

[off-screen] I gotta have this other end.

That needs to go the other way.

[voice-over] So we boom over and then had to wash 'em.

Wonderful, quiet Matt just hung in there and got real muddy.

How close can you get a crane in there?

Did they say?

[echoing guitars playing overlapping melodies] ♪ OK. ♪ Mister truck man, let's move this out 4 inches.

OK, good.

[violins support guitars] ♪ ♪ ♪ [energetic string and woodwind orchestration] ♪ ♪ [peaceful guitar tune] ♪ (Thomas) I built it.

It was a box that I cut in half and slipped the floor plan, you know, and then went up high.

It looks kinda like a steeple, I now realize, but I wanted to be up high so I could see out, and I didn't have much money.

And almost everything was seconds or free, even the Sheetrock.

There was a big flood in Asheville.

I got a big load of it for nothin'.

You know, this was about as far from Washington Cathedral and prep school as you can get, and I needed to do that.

♪ Wow.

And all the while, I was thinkin', oh, I gotta make art, and I didn't know what to make.

And I'm glad I didn't make more than I did that was trying to be art because what I needed to do, especially looking back at it, was learn about my relationship to this land and, by extrapolation, any land.

I was learnin' about land in general and how water flows on it and how the sun hits it and how it changes over the seasons and what floods do, and I was just livin', you know-- livin' out in the country, and I'd never done that before.

Living here for almost a decade taught me so much about the natural world and my relationship to it: that I'm just crawlin' around on this land for a while--heh-- and then I'm gone.

[violins support plucked cello melody] ♪ (man) The reels, uh, I go by them every day, and sometimes I just drive the golf cart out there, sit on there, and watch the goats graze out there.

And it's like a sanctuary.

It turns it into a very special place for just enjoying life more fully because of its beauty and all the associations.

The Duet are really interesting pieces because they turn.

These are the two that look like tortoise shells.

These are on 3-inch axles, and if the wind is 20 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour, they'll turn.

So what's really interesting about those, they're different pieces every time the wind blows.

I have an appreciation for sight that I never had before.

It's an enormous luxury that I think if you're never exposed to it, you go through life without it.

♪ (woman) The moving of this library from its old location in Parkwood here was kind of traumatic for the community, and Thomas said, "Well, look, "why don't we try to bring all of the community together via this piece of art?"

And believe it or not, the soil that was used for this art is compiled of soil from Parkwood, from Lowe's Grove, from a variety of spots in the community.

The one thing that this piece of art has done from the day it was installed was to, uh, evoke a lot of comments.

We've heard, "It looks like a stack of books."

People wanna rappel it.

You know, if you're a climber, just like, "Ooh, I've just got to do this!"

But all in all, people love this piece.

♪ (Mom Tri Devakul) He was showing me photograph of cranes pulling them up and putting them in place and so on.

I said, "Well, remember the time at the cathedral with all these stone blocks?"

That cathedral was being built piece by piece with hand strength and hand laborers.

And I said, "Why don't you design something "like the cathedral in the sense that people "can use their hand to create and lift up into place?"

People who come there seem to think it's just part of the landscape.

"It's been there, a pagoda.

Must have been there for a hundred years"-- heh, heh-- more or less!

But one of those strange things, and they go inside, and, "Wine bottles?

Did they have wine in those days?"

I say, "No, this was done by Thomas Sayre--heh, heh!"

And even now it's a big condominium for wasps and all sorts of insects.

Insects loves it-- heh, heh, heh!

♪ (woman) People think that it looks like blades of grass, representing the field that it's in.

I don't really care what anybody else thinks about it.

I love it.

It belongs there; it was birthed there.

It's perfect for the space.

It is timeless.

It will be there long, long, long after I'm gone.

♪ (Thomas) There are evidences of all of the wonderful people that worked, all of us together, digging this hole.

All that is part of the piece.

They latched onto this idea and fearlessly and very quickly just said, "We're gonna do this."

And-- and it's hard to resist.

I've never worked in a place with as much support as in Lenoir.

(man) We have a community that loves the arts here.

We have sculpture pieces all along our streets.

We have more sculpture for a town our size than anywhere in the United States of America.

[playing Dixieland jazz] (woman) We're gonna dedicate right now this wonderful, wonderful piece of sculpture to all the citizens of Caldwell County and, by extension, to all of the citizens of the world.

It serves as that unexpected moment and pleasure.

It sparks discussion.

If you filled up the hole, it would look like those blades.

(woman) And so everybody here held hands and walked through the piece in a long snake, and it really was moving.

People say they've never felt such a sense of community here as they did that day.

[beeping] What I don't know is if it'll turn and go right angle-- I mean, it will, but whether, you know, we're gonna be hitting the fence and stuff.

Some of the engineering input was from a precast concrete guy named Henry Charles, and I learned some new moves from him.

And one of the things is that these are pretty chunky, and we could do what we did in Oregon, which is pull 'em on ground and pick 'em up, um, rotate 'em up on their base.

He said, "Well, there's a lotta stress in that.

Why don't you just rotate 'em in the air?"

[vibraphone chords chiming] We could pick up horizontally off the truck and in midair rotate and then boom over and set with-- with plumb, and it just went right over the anchor bolts.

Put the nuts on.

I know this is absurd, but humor me.

♪ [droning, discordant strings support vibraphone] ♪ Nuts?

It's, uh-- ♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Whoa, whoa!

Jeez, come on!

A month earlier in the 97-degree weather, getting 150-pound-each baseplates perfectly plumb in two dimensions with the column-- I mean, we worked hard at that.

You know, a 20-foot thing, if you're off an eighth of an inch, I mean, you see that, and... somehow we got it right, and four of 'em were perfect as is.

They were right on.

♪ [off-screen] Is that knot on there good?

♪ [voice-over] It was thrilling to see that build throughout the day.

♪ As more and more got there, it was then that I could see the cloister form.

I could see all the thrown dirt, and then off in the distance with the light hitting it was the teeth part, and it just shown out, and-- and it was beautiful.

These, um, 16,000-pound objects are safely erect.

♪ So at the cathedral, there's a cloister.

It's open air, and you can walk through it.

And above that was my father's office.

And next to that was the vesting room where he and all the ministers got their ecclesiastical garb on, and it's called the slype.

When I was a kid playing in the slype, I was constantly running through these Gothic arches.

When I was designing this, I was not thinking consciously about the cathedral.

Well done, Rick.

[voice-over] All these eight arches are up.

♪ And I looked up, and I realized it was the slype.

[church organ leads] And it was-- it was magical.

♪ [echoing guitars playing overlapping melodies] ♪ (Wilson Sayre) What does it mean to have a circle sticking out of the ground?

Like, why?

Why is that profound?

The forms that he's chosen, be it a vessel or a circle or, you know, something that looks like a tiller or vessels, but they're on their side, they're, like, almost like Zen circles.

They're meditative forms.

(Diana King) The brain is different in a dyslexic.

The ability to deal with spatial relationships and color and all those things is an innate gift, and his artwork is wholly original.

(woman) The scale, you know, probably is reflective of how he grew up, the scale and the spirit of it, the-- the rising up out of the ground toward the heavens.

Thomas is a very literate person, and he is very articulate about certain aspects of his process.

He's not just an artist, but he's also an advocate for art-- public art in the country as well as here in North Carolina.

He is very much interested in ensuring that it doesn't end with him.

I think Thomas has a real ability to connect with stories of place that are meaningful to people.

(Happy) Finding the story of that place and of the people in that place and what the people do in that place is all part of the story that he weaves into his sculptures the same way that our father wove that into stones and stained glass and the needlepoint at the cathedral.

Thomas is so Wilsonian, uh, in so many ways that he does things, this sort of intensely personal pursuit of everything he does.

(A. Scott Berg) I'm reminded of something, uh, Woodrow Wilson said, which is, "We are not put into this world "to sit still and know.

We are put in it to act."

That means belonging to a community.

It means if you are an artist, I think it's about putting something out there for the community to see.

(Charlotte) Thomas calls us to community.

I think we tend to show our best selves when we are in community.

(Jessie Sayre Maeck) He calls it "doing the dance."

What he means by that is, he's bringing others that want to participate in something important and are ready to do that.

He's bringing them to where they see how they can do that and what it's gonna mean.

[laughing] (Thomas) Do-si-do, reverse.

[cello leads slow, resonant, soulful arrangement] ♪ This sounds self-aggrandizing, and--and I-- I don't mean it that way.

I mean it in more the poignant sense, but I've thought about the Greek heroes and-- and them wrestling or biblical heroes wrestling-- Jacob with the angel-- until I'm blessed, and it feels like that.

The capacity us humans have for that kind of energy that gets brought to bear on this, in some ways, silly thing is, um... a mystery to me that we humans do that, are capable of doing it and seem to want to do it.

And if there's something precious about that giving that humans can do... to, you know, a hole in the ground... that we ascribe meaning to and can put that kind of good stuff into a hole.

[organ droning] [bright string arrangement] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Caption Editor Will Halman Caption Perfect, Inc. CaptionPerfect.com (female announcer) This program is made possible in part by... ...for making meaning in his work using the earth as his studio; by the Lenoir Tourism Development Authority-- tucked away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Lenoir, North Carolina, has a rich heritage of crafts and sculpture, including work by Thomas Sayre... ...and by the Lucy Daniels Foundation, proud to support the creativity of all artists, especially Thomas Sayre... ...with additional funding from the... ...and the...