The Wave Field - Ann Arbor, Michigan - Satellite Imagery Oddities on Waymarking.com

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"Title of Piece: Wave Field
Artist: Maya Lin
Acquired: 1995
Material(s): Earth and grass
Category: Public Art
Location: Courtyard, SE side of Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Building
Comments: Commissioned by the Association FXB in memory of Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (‘82 Aerospace Engrg.), and gift of his mother, Countess Albina du Boisrouvray. A pure earth sculpture occupying a 90’ square space and representing a naturally occurring wave pattern, artist Maya Lin described it as "...pure poetry. It is a very gentle space that exists on a very human scale. It is a sanctuary, yet it’s playful, and with the changing shadows of the sun, it is completely transformed throughout the day. ‘The Wave Field’ expresses my desire to completely integrate a work with its site, revealing the connectedness of art to landscape, or landscape as art." Lin is best known as the artist who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL. "

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The Wave Field" is a series of fifty grass waves in eight rows, covering approximately 10,000 square feet of a college campus. A combination of soil and sand, the field is blanketed with a verdant sod that makes the uniquely manicured lawn a luxurious place for relaxing, studying, or playing. People can often be found nestled within the comfortable dip of a wave or perched on a crest where the piece can be surveyed as a whole. Located alongside the François-Xavier Bagnoud building for aerospace engineering - named so for a graduate of the program who died in a helicopter accident in the Mali desert in 1986 - "The Wave Field" is a work rich with many references: from the geographic to the art historical, from the scientific to the autobiographical. And yet, while the work is built from an intricate network of stories and references, there are few if any prerequisites necessary for appreciating the humor and unpretentious beauty "The Wave Field." As with the majority of Lin's pieces, the work has a life that is sensuous before it is verbal. Only after sinking into the curve of a wave or appreciating the undulating line of the horizon does one begin to ask questions or make associations to a world of ideas beyond the work.

Rarely riding on the surface, all of Maya Lin's works possess undercurrents of personal associations. Born in Ohio but raised by parents who immigrated from China to the United States only a year before her birth, Lin's work speaks of an Asian family aesthetic nurtured in a displaced, Midwestern context. The rhythm of the waves is reminiscent of Chinese paintings from the Song Dynasty (960-1126) as well as Japanese woodcuts from the Nineteenth Century, and yet the use of earth and grass to make forms finds its precedent in the Ohio Hopewell burial mounds of the artist's childhood geography. Precedents for the work also exist in contemporary art history with large earthworks by artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and James Turrell - all cited by Lin as deeply influential to her sense of scale and interest in geologic time.

But it is the artist's interest in the sciences that generated the initial image for "The Wave Field." While researching the disciplines of aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, Lin stumbled upon an image of the Stokes wave: a naturally occurring phenomenon on the open sea. Intrigued by the way in which science has afforded unprecedented views of the universe - from satellite images of the polar ice caps and the lunar surface to the split-second photograph of a splash of water - the artist set about transforming what was once liquid and in flux into a permanent fixture of the landlocked, Midwestern landscape. That the grassy waves also resemble the expansive sandy hills of a windswept desert is a poetry that resonates with the occasion for the work: to commemorate a valued alumnus of the school whose aircraft crashed in the African desert. That the work in its final form inspires discovery, play, and joy amongst children who roll down its three foot crests ties the work to a larger operating metaphor: out of tragedy and loss can come life and celebration. A concept as inextricably bound to Eastern philosophy as it is to the principles of thermal dynamics, "The Wave Field" - as an inherently social work - demonstrates that out of destruction can come creation and the possibility for renewal.

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