Alice Aycock
The Solar Wind
Suggestive of an elaborate scientific apparatus, The Solar Wind is a 31-foot anti-mechanical machine that grew out of Aycock’s interest in linking modern technology with the historical past. Constructed in 1983, the structure visually signals rationality, industrial achievement, and logic and implies both creation and destruction of form. The machine both seeks and reveals certain realms of reality which defy other modes of knowing. The Solar Wind derives its form in part from cosmic diagrams of heavenly bodies.
“In designing this piece, I was thinking of all the potential power that exists — what if there was this force that was neither bad nor good, but mindless — a kind of ray source of power.”
-Alice Aycock