Water Sculpture 1966

Selected Citations and Comments

A water-driven sculpture placed in the Roaring Fork River in Colorado that prefigures Laing’s later ‘sculptures in the landscape’.

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Mechanical details arrived at after much thought, admiration at and involvement with the fast rocky river which tumbles and swirls down deep clefts in the pass here, fishing, skipping stones on lakes, consideration of surfboards, spinners, hydroplanes, shields, helmets, heraldry, Zeke Clumer’s auto gyro, uniforms, science fiction, and general wonder… Like spores from space - a whole army of bright-coloured gleaming ovals skipping their way endlessly across the living water, splashing sometimes and sometimes driving forward, full of mysterious purpose - going about their urgent business, striving upstream. I would like to put them in a lonely part of the river, in the wilderness, so that the traveller would be astonished to see them working away busily, oblivious of an audience or of the lack of one.

Gerald Laing, 'Aspen Notebook', unpublished manuscript, 1966