Archives: Projects

Our intent is for the artwork to unfold during the visitor’s passage by foot from their parking spot to the terminal; it is inherently linked to one’s journey. The artwork will be distributed through the light well as a series that increases in size as one moves towards the terminal. The piece will be made up of separate hanging forms that each seem to grow downward as an expansion on the previous form. The experience of the artwork will be similar to driving along a palm tree lined boulevard or landing on a runway. Each of the forms will visually come together to make a colonnade that crescendos or tapers, depending on the traveler’s direction.

Serving as both a functional bench as well as commemorating the life of a local surfer, this work was created by employing manufacturing techniques as well as aesthetic characteristics from the sport of surfing.

How do we make artwork for an audience of biologists if we ourselves are not biologists? How do we confront this challenge within the context of an art practice where we explore structure and materiality rather than representation?

Organic Dreams Synthetic Means grew out of an extensive investigation into the material properties of fiberglass rod. This was our first experience working with the material, so, we felt like scientific researchers making hypotheses about its potential for sculpture, then testing each through full-scale mock-ups and models.

Our design process began with straightforward questions – what kinds of structure and forms can we make with fiberglass rods that we couldn’t accomplish with other materials? In other words, what do the rods want to become? Why are they unique and what formal and structural proclivity does this particular material have? We then asked questions relating the site: how can we make a structure that holds its own within the busy public space at the Advanced Teaching and Research Building?

Rather than accepting the flat plane of the wall as a backdrop for a two-dimensional artwork or making a sculpture that rests on the ground plane, we asked how we could engage the space in an unexpected way by making a work that launches from the wall, projecting into the room and over the heads of viewers. What does it mean for a sculpture to project off of a wall twenty feet? Our next step was to ask how to coax form that is suggestive of several biological entities from this highly engineered sculptural structure.

Although it is clearly synthetic – a man-made product of design and fabrication, the structure and materiality have affinities to several biological systems and processes. For example – the growing shoot tip of a plant, a branching network of capillaries in a vertebrate circulatory system, or a papilla on the surface of a leaf, to name a few.

For the biologist as well as the layman we hope to evoke multiple references. The association of the form with particular biological structures will be dependent upon the viewer, their discipline within biology, and their level of experience and understanding of the biological world. Organic Dreams Synthetic Means should not be viewed as a biological model of a specific entity, but instead, be left open to interpretation by the viewer regardless of their field of inquiry.

96 Variations on a Phylogenetic Tree is an art installation in the Bessey Hall atrium. It developed through a collaborative process with University Scientists. Together, we studied how we might fill the atrium with a representation of the Phylogenetic Tree, also known as the Tree of Life.

In biology, The Tree of Life shows evolutionary relationships among all organisms. It is a diagram that branches upward from “a common ancestral life-form”, or the origin of all species. The branches, known as “taxa” to biologists, are groups of closely related species. Three “domains” (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucaryota) encompass the taxa.

We made our tree in stainless steel ball chain. Thousands of individual chains interconnect like a web, and are suspended within the atrium. The chains, each hanging from two points, represent the branches. Three contrasting colors indicate the three domains. Near the bottom of the installation, a single vertical chain represents the common ancestor.

Ball chain is very thin, a few strands would look insubstantial within the four story atrium. To give the tree a stronger visual presence, we made 96 variations using five and a half miles of chain. Each variation is slightly different in scale and composition than the others.  Multiple iterations of the tree give the installation depth within the narrow atrium but they also function conceptually as an acknowledgement that scientific model is a snapshot of contemporary understanding.  Scientific knowledge is continually evolving by reevaluating existing models while developing new ones.  Science itself, is iterative.

20093 segments of chain, each unique in length and location, comprised the installation.  To accommodate so much intricacy, we worked with a computer controlled machine to cut the ball-chain into unique segments then link the segments in a precise order to make the individual chains.  The chains interconnect and when under the effects of gravity while hung in the atrium, form the Tree.

The resulting artwork is a dynamic system in equilibrium:  the weight of an individual chain influences the shape of the entire tree while the shape of the entire tree, in turn, impacts the shape of the individual chain.  As an artwork, it is a visual metaphor for the delicate balance among all living things.  It will invite us to better appreciate the inter-relatedness of humans with the Tree of Life, identify our role in the environment, and help us to see our responsibility for the well-being of the planet.

This is a kind of urban-scaled graphic equalizer display for which I rigged geophones, typically used to measure seismic activity, to the platform and output the signal to a large screen below the tracks. It registers the approach and arrival of trains, and the footsteps of commuters walking on the platform.

This project was installed in Pittsburgh Market Square. The piece is an abstracted representation of Amsterdam Island, the furthest inhabitable place on earth from Pittsburgh. Visitors were able to look into the craters on the piece and see real images from Amsterdam Island.

Atrium Suspension will be both an iconic sculpture and a delicate atmosphere; it will swirl through the Rivergate Tower north atrium. For those passing through the space, it will provide an encounter between the everyday and the sublime by way of sophisticated algorithmic computation combined with a proprietary processes of fabrication. The extreme intricacy of the piece suggests breath-taking natural phenomena such as fluid dynamics or aurora borealis.

Lapping at the Peakby Ball-Nogues Studio, 2017. Stainless steel and paint. Commissioned by Colorado Creative Industries

Integrating complex digital computation with traditional textile patterning techniques, Lapping at the Peak is the latest in the series of hanging artworks that Ball-Nogues calls Suspensions. It reflects the artists interest in reshaping architectural space with a minimal use of material to make ghostly three-dimensional paintings.

This work is comprised of approximately 19000 individual pieces of stainless steel ball chain, totaling almost 16 miles in length. Each chain has been meticulously painted, measured and cut to length to form “catenaries” suspended from the lobby ceiling at the Ent Center for the Arts. The weight of the individual chains creates a complex system of overlapping catenary curves on which the artists carefully composed three colors.

When viewed from particular vantage points, the ephemeral array of chains have recognizable geometric forms; when viewed from other directions, they blur to resemble a fluid-like vapor that floats and lingers overhead.

Once neatly paved and flat, the paved driveways in front of the Barracks buildings have decayed to a state of semi-function.  We propose drawing out their inherent beauty by repairing them and bringing them up to contemporary standards of accessibility. Our aim is to illuminate repair as a moment in the history of the walkways and decay as part of the history of Fort Barry.

We based our approach on Kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. From the Japanese the term roughly translates to mean golden joinery or golden repair.  At Headlands, we will treat the driveways as part of the history of the Fort Barry.

We will work in the manner of archaeologists by documenting each pathway, collecting and organizing the fractured and misaligned fragments of concrete, meticulously reassembling them to form a flat surface, then shaping and filling the cracks between them with a colored terrazzo mortar.