Skein

This was written about Patrick Dougherty’s sculpture, Cursive Takes a Holiday. Cathy was saying that Patrick weaves Möbius strips inside his structures, Einstein’s bends of space. Like a Möbius strip, he leaves the dimension we’re in and takes you into another dimension and back without your even realizing it.

I see his whirls not just as accessible roller coaster excursions with saplings, but as Fibonacci series mirrored and embedded in the brush of the Cottonwood marsh at Tippet Rise.

Beneath the cat’s cradle of the bushes in the marsh, the wetlands continue along the Fishtail stream, through the bramble near the Hoffmann cabin and past Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams and Cursive sculptures, then past Francis Kéré’s Xylem pavilion to the artist residences near Will’s Shed.

Patrick’s stick whirlwinds spread like fog from the schoolhouse there, tendrils coiling to form dignified bories, huts, in the meadow next to Arup’s Tiara.

I tried to imitate the frenzied curve of twigs with words, a kind of paint by numbers string web between the stars, as Einstein discovered that space was twisted, which makes a quantum world possible. Our minds twine like Patrick’s sticks, and so his meshes invoke many designs: neurological, molecular, zodiacal, quantum, architectural, and natural.