Note: This is the final revision to my Original Writing Piece. After using feedback from BC and Christy for my initial revision, I also received a (very nice) critique from Will Hooker himself. Easily the most terrifying moment of the entire semester was the day I received Hooker’s emailed response to my work. Fortunately, he liked it and offered the following comments:
“There is only one change that I would make; where you say I was working on the Duke University grounds crew when I got an opportunity to teach in the College of Design, I had actually moved from the Duke job back into a landscape architecture office. My boss there was assigned the job of teaching a 2-3 week project in the landscape architecture department and I took over for him. I guess another thing is that your story implies that I just started using bamboo with “The Trail of Zephyros”; actually I started using bamboo for sculpture in 1992. Not a big deal really. I do love the photos you’ve chosen; well done. Again, Thanks!!!!
I’ve corrected these inconsistencies below, and I owe Will Hooker many thanks for giving me so much of his time and for patiently answering all of my questions.
Landscape Artist Offers New Interpretation of Monet Paintings
Will Hooker is no stranger to the creative process. He’s a landscape designer and a professor. He’s been a ballet dancer and a craftshop worker. And most recently, he’s used his creative skills to finish an outdoor art installation designed to herald the arrival of the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Visit Will Hooker’s “Reflections From the Ru”
just behind the North Carolina Museum of Art.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)
The “Monet in Normandy” exhibit is new to the Museum, but Will Hooker and his art are not. Hooker, a North Carolina State University horticulture professor, has had an association with the Museum since 2004, when he created his first bamboo piece for the Museum Park, the outdoor grounds of the Museum, called “The Trail of Zephyros.”
Hooker arranges poles in his 2004
sculpture to have “sensuously curving
horizontal and vertical flow.”
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)
The Installation: “Reflections From the Ru”
Hooker’s new installation, titled “Reflections From the Ru,” features a series of bamboo shoots rising from the water’s edge with hand-blown, highly reflective gazing balls placed throughout the pond. Visitors experience a different view with each step around the pond as their point of reference changes. The piece is so named because Hooker drew inspiration from Claude Monet’s lily pond, fed by the river Ru in Giverny, Normandy. He explains, “Basically this piece is about color on a pond to reflect Monet’s Water Lilies paintings and to bring attention to his work to coincide with the opening of the exhibit…honoring the impressionist master’s passion for color, the multi-colored gazing balls are scattered amongst the ‘reeds,’ with the whole creating an ever changing play of light, color, reflections and unanticipated surprises.”
Students waded out as far as they could with the
gazing balls, leaving deep water placement for the boats.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)
Hooker and his Residential Landscaping students spent the weeks leading up to the Monet exhibit’s arrival wading in and out of the Museum Park pond, placing the gazing balls and bamboo shoots in exact locations. Hooker originally wanted to arrange the balls in clusters resembling Monet’s lily pads, but keeping enough separation between the fragile gazing balls to prevent breakage from a little wind or a flock of birds landing prevented that arrangement.
Hooker experimented with plastic rings around the exterior of the
gazing balls before deciding to hook a line to a brick on the bottom
of the pond to secure the balls (right) in a predetermined location (left.)
(Photos by Becky Kirkland.)
The Inspiration
When Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator, called to ask Hooker if he’d be interested in creating a companion piece for the Monet exhibit, Hooker immediately thought of using reflective balls. “It just popped into my mind to use gazing balls,” he said, because “they are perfect in form, a spherical globe, yet, being made of glass, incredibly fragile…The contrast and fragility, which is itself a comment on life, make these the perfect item to contemplate our lives.”
Hooker used 150 hand-blown gazing balls made in Ohio
to complete his pond installation.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)
But Hooker felt something about this vision was incomplete. Around the same time, he attended his daughter’s open house at the School of the Arts in Durham. One of the students showed a painting with vertical cattails in the foreground. Then he knew the missing piece in his own work was that vertical element, which he’d fill with bamboo. The bamboo, Hooker says, is “meant to pay homage to the local ecology, implying reeds around the edge of the pond.”
Trading a Car for a Coke
As a kid, Will Hooker loved art and nature. “If I was inside, I was drawing. If I was outside, I was running around in the woods,” he said. In college, Hooker found a way to marry the two in landscape architecture. He landed a job in Durham, NC and worked there until he “got the itch to travel.”
So Hooker sold or gave away everything he owned in the 1970’s. His car was the last item. He intended to drive it to the town dump to leave it there, but he was out of gas and stopped to purchase a quarter’s-worth– just enough to get him there. The attendant at the station offered to purchase the car, but Hooker wanted the story of giving it away. They settled for an exchange of car for coca-cola, and Hooker proceeded to hitchhike to California.
After stints in San Francisco, Germany and New York, Hooker returned to Durham from the northeast by bike. He worked as part of the Duke University grounds crew before returning to employment at a landscape architecture office. When a supervisor there passed down an opportunity to lecture in the College of Design at N.C. State, Hooker found the path to new professional satisfaction. One thing led to another, and he found himself with a tenure-track position in Horticultural Science, teaching in the landscape design program.
Discovering a Calling
Teaching, he learned, is his true calling. But he needed more to fulfill his creative yearnings. He did a little consulting and design on the side. He absorbed himself in dancing ballet. Then he teamed up with a Forestry department conference. One component of the conference was a volunteer day. Conference organizers discussed a design contest, but Hooker suggested they actually build something. He put together the design for a winding sculpture made of bamboo, a material he had used previously with inspiration from the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an environmental artist whose creations use all natural materials. Hooker and his students harvested more than 200 bamboo chutes for the project. The installation began with help from the conference volunteers and finished up with Hooker, his students, and anyone else who could assist. The result became the “Trail of Zephyros.” Completing the project, said Hooker, “gave me a thrill because it was a creative process and furthermore [included] working with students.” Hooker’s original vision was to carve out holes in the bamboo to make them work like flutes. Time constraints prevented that, but Hooker is pleased to note that over time, the bamboo aged in the sun to achieve his original vision by splitting and beginning to whistle in the wind.
Hooker adjusts one of the 161 poles
in his 2004 “Trail of Zephyros” piece.
(Photo by Becky Kirkland.)
Why Materials that Age and Disappear?
Hooker defines his creative style with a story about a class field trip. While his students enjoyed a little free time on the beach, Hooker entertained himself by creating a seagull sandscape. He was finishing the piece when a passerby asked why he chose to make art in the sand instead of using something that would last that he could sell. This was a defining moment for Hooker. He thought for a long time afterward, “Why did I build it out of sand?” He eventually concluded that the creative process is much more valuable to him than the potential product: “My reward is the juice of the creative process.” He jokes, “A lot of my work would be better if it disappeared quicker.” Regardless of the materials he uses (often natural elements such as sand, snow or bamboo) Hooker intends his art to be:
- Ephemeral
- Interactive
- Something that makes the viewer smile
He certainly meets these requirements in his current installment at the Museum Park, “Reflections From the Ru.” Viewers must walk around to view the piece completely, and the scene changes every time either the viewer or the sun moves. As Joseph Covington, the Museum Park Curator notes about the piece, “at the end of the day, when the sun is about to set, the color mixed with the reflection of the gazing balls is just magic.”
The Finished Product
“This piece did something for me,” Hooker says of his second project for the Museum Park. It has reassured him that when he’s ready to retire from teaching, he can “go around and do sculptures and be happy.” And from a teaching perspective, he’s pleased that his students have taken away from the project a better understanding of design. “It’s a subtle thing, but how do you stick poles in the mud in an artistic way? They could see [in the finished piece] that it made a difference.”
Joseph Covington is also delighted with the finished product. It combines art and the environment together, a goal of the Museum Park, and “it has the same kind of unexpected reflection of color in the water that Monet created in his water lily paintings.”
And like the “Monet in Normandy” exhibit’s stay in Raleigh, Hooker’s work is ephemeral. His pond installation will last until the Monet exhibit leaves the Museum after January 14, 2007. Then Hooker’s art, too, will vanish.
