Star Wheel

Star Wheel is a timepiece. A metaphoric, metaphysical map, wayfinding for your travels and your soul. An instrument for locating yourself in time and on the earth.

I have lived within ten or fifteen miles of Blue Mounds State Park in Minnesota for over twenty years. I have hiked there with our children, flown kites, painted plein air on the prairie. The tall grass prairie in early spring has a particular kind of flickering movement — thin grasses catching light, appearing and disappearing as you walk through them. I rendered that movement in sixteen-gauge divider strip, the thinnest line available, so that the grasses emerge from and dissolve back into the deep field of blues and yellows as you cross the floor.

The navigational waterways of Minnesota — the rivers, the lakes — are evoked through the form of my own canoe, a Merrimack, now made in Minnesota, with cherry ribs and hardwood ash appointments from the gunnels to the yoke. It has the classic look of canoes from the last century, and we have paddled it in the Boundary Waters. Those ribs and thwarts and inwales are in this floor. Scattered throughout, silver-coated aggregates, mirrored pieces, and mother-of-pearl shell catch the light the way stars catch on the surface of moving water at night.

The night sky is present throughout. A number of constellations are visible in the floor, including Polaris — the North Star — and the Little Dipper. All other stars turn around Polaris, as they always have. It has been a navigational marker for as long as people have been finding their way across this landscape.

An astrolabe is set into the composition at the exact latitude of this section of the airport: N 44.8819°. The Roman numerals that accompany it tell another story of time and timekeeping — which is, after all, what an airport runs on.

At the edges of the floor, petroglyph forms extend outward into the surrounding terrazzo, breaking out of the composition, refusing to be contained. I wanted them to misbehave a bit. These are what I believe to be atlatl images, drawn from my visits to Jeffers Petroglyph Park. The quartzite aggregate in the floor came from the East Sioux Quarry, operated by L.G. Everist. I wanted to bring the actual stone of the landscape outside the airport into the floor. It gives the floor just the right local color.

At the dedication, the architect told me he couldn’t imagine the airport without this floor. That it was essential.

As airline passengers move through this terminal I want them to feel their own travels and adventures connected to this longer movement of history and discovery. The story of humanity is one of a great journey: in a sense, we are all travellers. We locate ourselves in the stories that evoke our comings and goings, affirmed by the imagery which guides us in our discoveries of what might lay ahead and in our returning home.