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VU Professor to install floating sculpture at Centennial Park

Posted 9/9/2010

photo courtesy of David Wood

Nashville artist and Vanderbilt Professor David Wood has agreed to install his Heliotrope, a piece of floating Earth Art, in Centennial Park’s Lake Watauga for three months.  The piece bears witness to our increasing dependence on the daily energy of the sun and commemorates this year’s flooding in Nashville by marking a more harmonious relation to water.

The piece was briefly installed at the University of Richmond in the spring of 2010 and will be in Lake Watauga, in the shadow of the Parthenon, until the end of November.  Wood was particularly drawn to this site by the formal echoes of the radial pattern of Heliotrope in the fountains and water features of the lake, as well as the circular viewing area. “The radial symmetry of Heliotrope will resonate well with the classical vertical lines of the Parthenon,” he said.

Heliotrope is made of wood, steel, aluminum, rope and wire and is thirty-six feet in diameter.  It consists of forty sixteen-foot wedges joined together in the shape of a sunflower.  Each wedge is topped with shiny aluminum discs that sparkle in the sun.

David Wood is professor of philosophy and of art at Vanderbilt University.  His most recent large scale works have been Weerewaa Vortex (2009), Lake George near Canberra, Australia, and Spiral Resonance Field (2009), at the Balloon Museum, Albuquerque, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, part of New Mexico’s Land Art project.  He has a lively relation with the legacy of Robert Smithson, recharting the journey recorded in “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969), and temporarily adding a new layer to Spiral Jetty.  He also buries Chronopods around the world, marking place and history. Wood is the director of Yellow Bird Sculpture Park (also an Artists Retreat & Wildlife Refuge), an ongoing project located in Woodbury, TN.

The installation of Heliotrope involves students from Wood’s Environmental Ethics class and the Department of Art at Vanderbilt, as well as various graduate students, friends and colleagues.  Heliotrope will be installed in early September in cooperation with Parthenon Director Wesley Paine and Parks Assistant Director for Consolidated Maintenance Mike Bays.  

For further information, please contact Dr. David Wood at david.c.wood@vanderbilt.edu