Alice Aycock's Alien Twister (2018) is now installed on the west end of Dartmouth's campus. The sculpture complements the energy of the surrounding buildings housing the Thayer School of Engineering, the Irving Institute for Energy and Society, and the Tuck Business School.
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 grandnephew 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 excerpt was conducted in the run-up to the installation of the College's newest work of public art. The full interview will be released in the upcoming 2025 Winter Hood Quarterly.
John R. Stomberg, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director: Your career has followed quite an arc, from earthworks to your present focus on complex objects. Could you summarize the development of your practice?
Alice Aycock, Artist: 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...
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