The two new sculptures Jim Estes has created outside the Potter Fine Arts Building are scheduled to be completed within the coming month.
Started in November of last year, Estes has worked steadily on the pieces over the winter with help from Western’s maintenance and ground crew, who have loaned him their welding equipment and helped him with technical problems while maneuvering the 500-pound sections of the Passages sculpture into place.
“I am teaching myself as I go, as I have never worked in metal before, nor have I had a teacher that has worked in metal of this scale, so I have been experimenting,” Estes said. “The joy of education is learning what we didn’t know before.”
He created the Beyond 2010 piece with money he received for winning the Distinguished Professor Award last year, wanting to tie in with President Scanlon’s initiative to install more art on campus. Estes’ concept for the piece was to design a forward-looking, inquisitive piece that causes people to ask questions and to inspire people to want to learn more of things that don’t even exist yet. The idea for this piece is loosely based off the monolith from the movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which the mathematical ratio of prime numbers 1:4:9 represent themselves in varying forms. The sculpture is close to this ratio, but the proportions were approximated for the sake of aesthetics.
The Passages piece represents a three-dimensional graph of life and symbolizes the ups and downs and the ebb and flow of existence. It will be finished in primary colors and be permanently secured when’s it’s done.
“I want my work to have a degree of mystery, and I want the viewer to get involved with the pieces,” Estes said. “A university should be a place where not only answers are given but questions are asked.”
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