JOHN R. STOMBERG, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1964 Director
Hood Quarterly, winter 2024
This year, the Hood Museum received financial support from Neil Smiley '82 and his wife, Judy, to acquire Alice Aycock's large-scale sculpture Alien Twister. Neil is a past member of the Hood Museum of Art Board of Advisors and the grandson of Harvey P. Hood '18, the original supporter of the museum that bears the family name. The sculpture is sited at the junction of the computer science and engineering buildings—and around the corner from the energy institute—all of which are perfect thematic matches for this dynamic work. The following interview was conducted in the run-up to the installation of the College's newest work of public art.
JRS: Your career has followed quite an arc, from earthworks to your present focus on complex objects. Could you summarize the development of your practice?
AA: I'd like to start with a very early piece, titled Sand/Fans (1971). I made this piece when sculpture was conceptual and somewhat anti-object as a reaction against minimal art. Earth art was in the ascendancy, and art was about transition, movement, and the ephemeral. We were into things that were in transitory states. I placed two tons (4,000 pounds) of sand in a mound and positioned four industrial fans around it. I wanted to create a vertical dust devil. I had just traveled across the vastness of America and visited the national parks and the geological formations in the landscape. Instead of vertical dust devils, the installation formed horizontal waves in the sand. Sand/Fans was about chance and movement—the necessary structure and the contingent event. I think one can trace my interest from that piece to my interest in movement. The Twister pieces go back to Sand/Fans, where you see those beautiful waves that the sand makes in the wind, those interference patterns, which are random. I would say that was the genesis of where I am today with the Twisters.
JRS: Let's move on to the Paper Chase series, which included Twisters on Park Avenue: how did you translate those big ideas about cyclonic energy into actual objects? What was the intellectual journey like?
AA: Park Avenue is the Piazza San Marco of New York. If Times Square is the chef's kitchen, Park Ave is the formal elegant living room. For Park Avenue Paper Chase, I tried to visualize the movement of wind energy as it flowed up and down the avenue (and the intellectual energy as well), creating random whirlpools touching down here and there and sometimes forming dynamic three-dimensional massing of forms. The sculptural assemblages suggest waves, wind turbulence, turbines, and vortexes of energy. One of the works, in particular, references the expressive quality of wind through drapery and the chaotic beauty of fluid/flow dynamics. As much as the sculptures are obviously placed on the mall, I wanted the work to have a random haphazard quality—in some cases, piling up on itself; in others, spinning off into the air.
Also, there was a song by the Cocteau Twins called Paper Chase [Persephone] that was an inspiration; I would listen to that song all the time . . . and it would put me in the mood. Diagrams are really important to me—the underlying diagrammatic structure of the natural world. I saw Leonardo da Vinci's Deluge drawings probably in the 1980s. Leonardo has always been a hero of mine, not so much the paintings, but the incredible drawings where one sees his curiosity—his inquiring mind. This series was certainly an inspiration.
JRS: Could you describe the process and how you work with the fabricator to get those intricate parts constructed?
AA: When I first began to build things, I worked like an architect with graph paper and a slide rule—drawing things from an isometric perspective so that I could scale the work and understand how to construct it. Then someone said to me, "You know, Alice, there are computer programs that you can use that will design and scale." So now [my assistants] are working on the computer, and I'm leaning over their shoulder or watching on the screen as a work takes shape, is spun around from multiple views, and is rendered in a particular space at the appropriate scale. Far from this technology taking me away the creative process, in fact, it has given me much more ability to imagine the work, develop it, and change it until it resolves into a final state. After this, the Rhino file is sent to my fabricator, EES Design, which transforms the design into a SolidWorks file in which every aspect of my original design is specified and engineered. At this point, the work leaves my imaginative, virtual world and becomes buildable. I like to think of it as an act of magic.
JRS: Let's talk about the material itself. It is powder-coated aluminum. How does that material reinforce or advance your ideas?
AA: I think the white powder-coated surface captures the light when the sun shines on it and defines the twist and turns of the curves. The Twisters are also inspired by cumulus clouds. I have looked at clouds since I was a young artist. Also, from a maintenance point of view, powder-coated aluminum is easily cleaned, and it holds up well over time.
JRS: Could you talk a little about Alien Twister itself?
AA: Alien Twister has a kind of zany quality. Some of the other Twisters in the series are more tumultuous. It has the complex composition of the other works—the whirling and swirling of the ribbons. It feels as though it could walk down the street. Almost as though it has a top hat on. The reason I called it Alien is because I love flying saucers, spinning tops, and gyroscopes, so that is a reference.
JRS: Do bodies in motion or dancers have an influence on what's going on here too?
AA: Yes, yes. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and one night in February, a warm wind was blowing. I climbed out my window and danced in the wind. It was as though I didn't have a separate body. I was one with the wind, and it was so exhilarating. It was so extraordinary. I was by myself. Nobody knew. And it was just an extraordinary moment.
JRS: Avoiding the pitfalls of "plop art in our installation," could you describe what you look for in a location for your work?
AA: My works speak to the surrounding environment in which they are situated. I want the work to not be solitary objects where the viewer says, "oh, that's art and then there's everything else." That's not the way I look at the world when I place art outside the white box. In the case of Alien Twister, its movement speaks to the trees and grasses and the natural elements that surround it, as well as the university context in which the invisible energy of ideas, experimentation, and invention is in the air.
JRS: What are your long-term hopes for your sculpture in its new home?
AA: Well, you can never tell how the students and the public will respond. I'm hopeful that something will happen that will make them—and this is all hopeful and aspirational—in a positive way—that Alien Twister will be something that they encounter that was not just like everything else in the world but instead sparks their curiosity about what art can be. When I'm teaching, I don't assume that all my students are going to choose to be artists. But what I try to do is engage some neural pathway that changes their life in some creative, interesting way. And allows them to follow their curiosity.