Alice Aycock: Six Outdoor Sculptures

Alice Aycock (b. 1946) lives and works in New York. Her internationally successful career took off in the beginning of the 1970s. She is considered a pioneer in sculpture thanks to her early works in the field of Land Art and has taught at leading universities. Since 1991, she has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Academic disciplines including the natural sciences as well as art history have always been vital sources of inspiration for her artistic practice. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center, which acknowledges artists who are masters of sculptural processes and techniques and have devoted their careers to the advancement of the sculptural field as a whole. She also received an Academy of the Arts Achievement Award in Visual Arts from Guild Hall in March of 2019.

Alien Twister is a mid-size white powder coated aluminum sculpture. The work’s title derives from the curvilinear plate at the very top of the sculpture, whose shape reminds the artist of a flying saucer. Furthermore, regardless of the nature of the environment the sculpture is placed in, the work always appears “alien.” With its asymmetrical, dynamic swirls the sculpture exceeds and introduces energy and chaos into its surroundings.

Spin-the-Spin consists of three differently-sized, similarly constructed parts and with its overall height of approximately 7 feet is one of the smaller sculptures by Alice Aycock. Its title refers to the name of an amusement park device and invites the beholder to imagine the curves of a gigantic slide or roller coaster track. Paradoxically, at the same time, the shape of the discs that are stuck on the three tilted poles rammed into the ground is reminiscent of diamond wheels. Accelerated to very high speed these types of very hard blades are used to drill and cut into the hardest stone.

The large twister with loosely meandering bands of white sheets of aluminum around a broken and tilted pole at its center is called Devil Whirls. For fear of their destructive power, weather phenomena like storms and hurricanes for centuries were seen as evidence for the power of evil. Ayock in her “Turbulence Series” seeks to capture these mostly invisible powerful forces of nature and to give shape to their often deadly beauty. Due to instabilities and turbulence created by heating and flow, whirlwinds form gradients that cause the formation of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. In Devil Whirls, this column is already broken; while at its base the wake vortices appear to already descend and decay, simultaneously the overloaded top seems to brake away and spin free at any moment.

Twister Grande (tall) is one of Aycock’s largest sculptures in the shape of a twister and one that most likely relates to a tornadic moment. The sculpture is visually very compact and more vertical than some of the other works, and the very dense layering of metal bands—in contrast for example with Devil Whirls—is suggestive of the very high energy, speed and dynamic power of a tornado. Aycock believes that artists have in common a love of disorder and paradox—they love things that are at the same time ravishing and terrifying, seductively beautiful and frightening.

Untitled Cyclone is a sculpture that is characterized by a large tilted disc at its base and three seemingly spinning discs at its top. These are accompanied and surrounded by multiple floating bands of metal, which—like comets’ tails—indicate movement and direction. With their pointed spikes the disks resemble giant “spinning tops,” children’s toys, which have spun off their original course and center of gravity and have been captured flying through the air. At the same time, Untitled Cyclone can be seen as a model for the universe and for the enormous natural forces and various centers of gravity that are the cause for rotation of the earth and planetary orbits. Thus, paradoxically, Untitled Cyclone is a sculpture that can be seen both a simple and playful shape, and at the same time as a very complex one.