Bennu — Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts
The autumn of 2016 saw record wildfire activity in East Tennessee with a series of fires in the Great Smoky Mountains. On November 28th a storm with wind gusts topping 80 mph moved through the area and the fires exploded, sweeping through the towns of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg that evening and into the night. fourteen people lost their lives. More than 2000 structures were damaged or destroyed.
Among the destroyed structures were two buildings on the campus of Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg; a dorm and a large garage housing equipment and tools for facilities and grounds maintenance. Following the fires I received a phone call from Bill May, Executive Director of Arrowmont, asking if I would be willing to create a commissioned sculpture from the remains of the tools and equipment destroyed by the fire to serve as a marker of both the event and the resilience of the community. After touring the site and recovering several pickup truck loads of scrap metal from the burn site, I discussed a variety of proposed designs with Bill and the staff at Arrowmont.
The design they ultimately selected is derived from a Seifert knot, a mathematical visualization. Working from a Seifert surface (think Möbius strip) I was interested in the significance of a form that, by a twist, becomes defined by its edge; a complex system that becomes unified in a new way by a warpage or trauma. A new edge determined by where the fire ended and the recovery began. Visually I considered the form an evocation of the swirling trauma of the fires, the coming together of the community and the winding trajectory of the sun through the sky over a calendar year. The tiling of the reclaimed tools is a nod to feathers but also an indicator of direction and movement in the work. The thermodynamic arrow of time twisting its way forward and around.
An unofficial symbol adopted by Bill at the time immediately following the fires was the Phoenix, the creature that emerged from it’s own ashes; an apt metaphor for the resilience and reconstruction in the community. The myth of the Phoenix has its origins in ancient Egyptian mythology drawing from Bennu, a heron like bird that symbolized the cyclical disappearance and reappearance of the sun. Bennu became the title for the sculpture as a gesture incorporating the narrative of the Phoenix while pointing also to the symbolic significance of the sun rising again on a new day.
