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Doug Taylor had a
great idea for a sculpture. Like his other work, it would reflect and
amplify the place that inspired it — Sawmill Point on the Selkirk waterway
in Victoria’s Gorge Harbour.
Like his other work, the wind would make it move. Unlike his other work —
Wind Swimmer at Kitsilano Pool, Mr. Lead, the walking horse in
Cordova Bay on Vancouver Island, his Ford pickup truck pinioned on trembling
aspens in Steveston or the Whiskeyjack Balance at Whistler’s Plaza of
Champions –- it would take a series of architects, three engineering firms,
a team of almost a dozen steel fabricators and all the 3-1-6 marine
stainless tubing in Canada to build.
Purple Martin
Spiral was installed in
Victoria this month; taken across the Georgia Strait
on a barge, lifted by helicopter across the harbour, then hoisted by crane
onto its base in a reflecting pool. It looks effortless, almost gestural: a
wire-frame bird chasing an insect, their darting flight path traced in a
coiled steel line from the bug through the bird and into the pool. And that
was what Taylor saw one summer
morning some four years ago, standing on the shore of the harbour.
“It was just one
hot summer morning, and the action of the feeding in flight ran through me,”
he remembered. “That’s the greatest feeling. It’s why you do it and it’s
often the biggest kick out of the process, including fabrication and
installation — that discovery. It’s unconscious; you really don’t know how
it got there.”
The purple martin
swallows got to Sawmill Point because the Ministry of Environment installed
nesting boxes to bring them back to the Selkirk Waterway. That’s why Taylor
saw them, and that’s what he aimed to capture in a series of maquettes —
scaled-down models of the piece he envisioned. The first ones were on a
scale of one inch to one foot — one twelfth the size of the proposed
finished piece.
More than one
person consulting with Taylor’s client (who insists on remaining anonymous)
told them the thing wouldn’t work. The client was just as inspired as Taylor
had been, and told him to figure out how to build the thing the way he saw
it: about thirty feet high, with a purple martin swallow that was ten feet
from beak to forked tail.
“It was beginning
of and engineering nightmare,”
Taylor said of the client’s
trusting him enough to figure out if the piece would work. “You’ve got
something that frightens people and you don’t know how it’s going to
translate when you blow it up. So I went into investigative engineering. We
did one version with very heavy pipe. It would have been safe. But it
wouldn’t have moved.”
Taylor’s movement
into investigative engineering — and later into the esoteric reaches of
envelope-pushing steel fabrication — are typical of his career path, which
features twists and turns like a flying swallow’s. He didn’t start out to be
an artist.
Working on a degree
in political science at Simon
Fraser University
in the late 1960s, he found himself frustrated with academia and looking for
something more expressive. He found clay. But even as he worked more with
clay and less with political theory, he didn’t think of himself as an
artist. He thought of himself as somebody who was investigating alternative
social structures. He helped start an artists’ cooperative that comprised a
dozen people and ran for fourteen years. During that time, he went back to
school at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where he worked with a
teacher named Jeff Rees.
“He used to say
that people who study art academically know what art is, but don’t know how
to make it. Art school folks may not know what it is, but they know how to
make it. That helped me immensely.”
He worked with
sound and movement in his pieces, as well as teaching at Emily Carr. He’s
also built extremely realistic Calusa and Seminole natives for the Florida
Museum of Natural History, astronauts for NASA’s Houston Space
Center and wireframe figures for architect Frank Gehry’s Experience Music
Project in Seattle.
Some artists make
work that seems aimed at proving certain critical or theoretical concepts,
or to be part of a rarefied dialogue between artists and critics — one that
many observers feel excludes anybody who doesn’t have a degree in art
history or critical theory.
Not Taylor.
“They’re all toys,”
he said of his work. “Toys are the greatest inspiration for me. People never
really grow up. They just get bigger adult bodies. And they really want to
continue to play. My inspiration comes from the work of many, many anonymous
folk artists. The Whiskeyjack Balance is based on a Quebecois toy
that I saw. The Wind Swimmer at Kits Beach is an exploded whirligig.
This swallow is like a jack-in-the-box.”
But not many toys
use 3-1-6 marine stainless tubing — material normally used for high-pressure
pulp-mill steam conduits. But the swallow had to be, because it’s next to
the ocean. And marine stainless tubing is the only material strong enough to
support the piece, flexible enough to let it move in the wind and fine
enough to look like a traced flight path. It took wind-tunnel testing at the
University of British Columbia and strain-gauge testing from engineering
firm Bacon Donaldson to figure that out, however.
“We did
strain-gauge tests on a quarter-scale prototype,” said Bacon Donaldson
engineer Bob Milne. “It’s the same kind of testing that’s done on prototype
aircraft.”
Thin strips of
metal are applied to the surface of the structure that measure how much
strain the metal is under as varying loads and stresses are applied to it.
In this case, many of those stresses consisted of Taylor
hanging on the model or leaning on it.
“The only real
difference between this and the work we normally do is that this is art
instead of something industrial,” Milne said.
The models and
their testing proved Taylor’s theories were right. But there was still the
challenge of building the full-size piece.
Burnaby’s George
Third and Son metal fabricators started as a blacksmith shop in 1910. In
almost a century of work, they’ve done some art along with their industrial
contracts, but not much. About a dozen people worked on Taylor’s swallow
through the spring and summer of 2003.
“It looked good as
a model and the idea was fine,” says Third’s Bart Crowe, project coordinator
for the swallow. “It’s one thing to think about a piece like this. It’s
another to build it in a way the artist will be happy with.”
At the end of July,
Taylor was finding it difficult to sleep. The project had come a long way.
He’d bought all the 3-1-6 marine stainless tubing available in Canada at the
time — $20,000 worth. The piece seemed so close to completion, but there
were still many unknowns. At one point, the coil midway up the base sank a
foot. Taylor was suddenly terrified the piece might not work. And getting
more 3-1-6 tubing would mean
having it shipped from Spain
through Montreal to Vancouver. But realigning its footing on the base and
tilting it seven degrees solved the problem, maintained the esthetics and
gave the swallow itself more of a soaring trajectory. Fixing the sag
improved the piece, almost as though the metal itself was asserting an
esthetic idea.
Now that the piece
is installed in Victoria, Taylor is in the early stages of his next piece.
Titled Khenko, it’s a massive heron planned for False Creek’s David Lam
Park. Sails and a series of wheels will use the wind to flap the heron’s
wings.
“That’ll be the
third bird in a kind of triptych: There’s the Whistler whiskeyjack, this
swallow on Sawmill Point, and then Khenko the heron. And that’s all
the birds I’m going to do.” |
