A more notable piece of art now sits outside Dowell Hall on the University of Minnesota Crookston campus and it resembles an eagle’s nest which falls in line with the university mascot - the Golden Eagle. Artist Patrick D. Wilson was commissioned by the campus and the nest sculpture was his idea. During the request for proposals process, Wilson thought of ways to engage the idea of the Golden Eagle without necessarily creating a direct image of it.
“While I was researching information on the Golden Eagle, I read that they were known to occasionally create nests on the ground if they were in areas with few rocky outcroppings or trees,” he explained. “I thought that idea was very suited to the flat landscape of glacial Lake Agassiz and also bridged the gap between how a human could experience a space that is meant for birds in a serious way.”
“The idea was that students and other members of the campus community could use it as a resting and thinking spot or meeting place,” Wilson added. “Once seated inside the nest, they will have a perfect vantage point that looks out onto the events of the campus. While they are in the nest, they have an opportunity to consider themselves in relation to that place, similar to the way an eagle might consider the landscape.”
Wilson also mentioned the importance of college as a “moment of becoming for students” and felt the sculpture would be appropriate to connect the importance of that moment to the idea of a nest and the potential in the egg.
“I also wanted to bring more representational content and so I included a partial map of Crookston on the egg,” he continued. “It is incomplete because I wanted to think of both the natural environment as it has been since the glacier melted and the city that has sprung up in recent times. The dramatic swerving shape of the Red Lake River made for a convenient border between those two ideas.”
The eagle’s nest sculpture, or “ground nest”, as Wilson refers to it, is made of cast bronze, Corten steel, and concrete. In choosing the media, Wilson said he chose robust materials that would stand up to the elements and the “dramatic swing” in weather conditions that Minnesota experiences. The sculpting process started with hundreds of hours of design and 3D modeling, and, once the pattern was created, the pieces were laser cut so they would fit perfectly. After it was all welded together and the edges were made smooth, it was sandblasted and had an acid patina added to it to accelerate the coloration.
“For the egg, I researched the average recorded width and height of the Golden eagle egg to create a ratio and then made something called a sweep mold,” Wilson described. “ I was able to create the egg in wax and carve the image of the landscape into the surface. That wax sculpture is then invested using a material called ceramic shell that creates a mold around the wax. The wax is burned out and replaced with molten silicon bronze, which is the bronze medium for pretty much every bronze sculpture you have seen.”
The project took over a year, and, when he added design, fabrication, and installation estimates, it was over 1,200 hours.
Other projects of Wilson’s include a 9/11 memorial to Thomas Edward Burnett at the Mall of America, a permanent work at the Buffalo Creek Art Center in Nevada, and the Solar Storm led-controlled sculpture resembling the Northern Lights found hanging in the Sargeant Student Center at U of M Crookston. Recently he’s been working on a series of steel sculptures designed to travel to various sculpture walks and sculpture parks around the country.
“I would like to say that I was very honored to be chosen to make the work, and very thankful for the support and patience of so many people on campus,” Wilson stated. “George French and Ken Mendez were with the project throughout, and Ryan Moe and the landscaping crew made the installation possible. It is my personal favorite work, as well as the most complex sculpture I have ever made so it means a lot to me to have it in the place where I grew up. I am looking forward to visiting it.”
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