Maya Lin's Wavefields (and other art)

After watching the video of Maya Lin again, talking about her three Wavefield earthworks, and looking at lots of photos, I'd really like to go visit them. It will have to be a vicarious visit for now - fortunately there are lots of photos on the internet.The most recent is in New York state, at the Storm King art centre, which until Nov 15 also has an exhibition that includes Pin River, made of tens of thousands of straight pins set into the gallery wall, creating the illusion of a shadow image of the Hudson River system - here's a closeup of part of it (love those shadows) - There are three of the Wavefields. The one at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1995) has waves 3-5 feet high – “you can sit in it, it’s very intimate in scale” she says.The second, Flutter (Miami, 2005) has waves a foot high, like how water travels over sand “a very different relationship when you walk through it”.(Image is from this blog, which also shows the adjacent courthouse and points out the dangers of photography in public spaces.)

Storm King has seven rows of waves over 300 feet long and 12-18 feet high, “much larger so that you become lost in it” -Trained as an architect, Maya Lin works in three formats - art, architecture, and memorials. She says: "Especially in the art, I've gotten back to my first love and interst, which is science and nature and the environment, so I'm always trying to reveal in my art a little bit about nature that literally is invisible to us." To do so she (or rather her technicians) use technological methods like sonar resonance and satellite mapping.

An intriguing piece is a world map, in relief, that she calls Ten Degrees North - it's made in 52 longitudinal segments which you can shift about so that you can have, for example, Australia at the centre of the map - shift your world view.

Her Systematic Landscapes exhibition, which is touring in the US, sounds fascinating. Here's an image from that show -And not to forget that her famous Vietnam War memorial can be seen as a piece of land art too - the black wall with the 57,000 names is backed by earth; it looks like the land has split - and the polished stone reflects the sky. When she saw the site she "wanted to cut it open and open up the earth and polish the earth's edges" -The Academy of Achievement website has an interview with Maya Lin. With her elder brother she made"a piece for the Cleveland Public Library called "Reading A Garden." The centerpiece is a pool of water, and the title of the piece, "Reading A Garden" is spelled backwards but reflects forward in the water, which clues you in that this is a poetry garden. It's a poem laid out three dimensionally. It's all about words and the directionality and weight of reading."

She says: "I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. It's making people aware of nuances, changes in depth, height, making you aware of perceptions in a very, very subtle level. Focusing you on a new way of looking at your surroundings, at the land. That's art to me" and "One of the key things in the architecture is that I want always to have you feel connected to the landscape so that you don't think of architecture as this discrete isolating object, but in a way it frames your views of the landscape, which is a very Japanese notion. So that the house is a threshold to nature, or basically begins to explore our relationship to nature. "