Wandering Stars is inspired by the geological events that shaped the landscape of the Willamette Valley and still influence our lives today.  Over a period of 2000 years at the end of the last ice age, the ice dam restraining glacial Lake Missoula ruptured multiple times, causing extraordinary floods that resculpted the land in the Pacific Northwest.  Carried over 500 miles along with the floodwaters were enormous quantities of soil and ice-rafted glacial erratics which were deposited in Oregon’s Willamette Valley as the floodwaters backed up at the Columbia River Valley narrows near present-day Kalama Washington. This mineral-rich soil contributes to the Willamette Valley’s topography and fertile farming areas which are arguably the basis for OSU becoming a land grant university. I was captivated by the story of the Missoula Floods and how researchers pieced together the history of these events from geological anomalies in the landscape that could be traced back to an ancient place and time.

The fourteen, cast aluminum, forms that are distributed along the 200-foot-long South and West frontage of Withycombe Hall fit together like a large three dimensional puzzle giving the impression that a once-unified element has fractured and dispersed across the landscape.

I drew inspiration for Wandering Stars from the idea that the anomalies that we find in a place, object or idea spark our curiosity to engage more deeply with whatever we might have encountered and how forces and events beyond our consciousness manifest locally in our environment referencing a kind of interconnectedness that underlies the systems at play in the natural, constructed and social environments that we inhabit.