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Charlotte's Wave I keep being asked to do more of these. This is a link to the one in Charlottesville, VA 2005.

There is a barn on Route 441 just north of Madison, GA that is beautiful. It is up on a hill beside the road and either end of the barn is blown out. The roofing is all that still holds the mammoth structure up. The peak of the barn’s roof has been pulled down into a graceful arch. It is obvious that the barn is going to fall, but currently it is in a peculiar state of balance. When I saw this I thought, if I could show this, no, if I could share this experience with others, that would be worth while. At first I wanted to rebuild the barn but that wasn't going to work. People would just see a falling down barn and miss the point. I had to isolate the grace and show them in such a way that anyone could understand. Here is where my engineering studies came in handy. I knew that the concept of the arch and the effect of a cantilever were holding up that barn roof, but how to show it? A wave. To build a wave out of an old barn would show this dynamic. To create more tension in the sculpture I decided to lean the back of the wave off the pad. There are other things that the site takes care of, for instance: How high should I make the wave? What direction should it crest? I looked at the pad and it was fourteen feet wide, a circle. Good, the wave would have a fourteen-foot diameter crest. That made sense. Also, the building behind the location had a weird roof that was made up of three rising triangles with little flat roofs protruding such that they looked like waves. OK. My Wave would crest to the left. I had savaged a barn from the nineteen twenties, so i had lots of interesting wood. I decided that part of my process would be not using a saw. I would just pick up a board and nail it in where it fit. I just had to remember to place them all at thirty degrees to each other, like ripples on the surface of water. Illustrations from my sketch book:

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