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"Wind Feathers" is a bronze kinetic wind sculpture, twelve feet high, commissioned for the entrance plaza of
Creek Casino Montgomery, in Montgomery, Alabama. It was completed in January 2014.
People have commented that the metal looks like copper but it's actually bronze with
a transparent red patina. This is considered the most stable and durable of bronze patinas,
much unlike bare copper, which would weather and turn green and other colors. Outdoors, the sunlight
and especially the setting sun really lights this up nicely in a fiery orange red.
The site has pretty ideal winds of 5 or 10 miles an hour much of the time - I was there
for a few days and the sculpture really hardly stopped moving until the wind went completely
calm after dark.
The motion of the sculpture is intended to be random, gentle, relaxed. In stronger winds
it'll be faster - but I don't want the shapes just spinning round and round like a windmill.
So, here's the strategy to avoid this. The main central C shape is biased to rest towards
one side, into the west wind, so that when the wind strengthens, as it has here, this
shape will swing around like a filling sail, and the whole thing actually weathervanes
180 degrees to the east. So the same wind that starts a shape spinning too fast, will
then turn the sculpture around to face the opposite way - where that same wind will now
slow that spinning shape down or even reverse it.
And it seems to work fairly well. You can see this process happening right here where
the wind is gusting up to maybe 15 miles an hour.
Now, if a site didn't have wind, or didn't have enough wind, or in an interior space,
something like this could be set in motion with a single simple motor in the base.
And this was something we often did on kinetic sculptures for the artist George Baker,
for whom I worked for many years.
The fountain was actually converted from an existing planter, and I suggested having this
raised central platform for the sculpture, with the water flooding the top
and spilling down over the walls.