A Place For Our Thoughts

A red aluminum head sits on the lawn outside the Pflugerville Public Library. The back of the skull is open, cut into a pattern, and the hollow inside it is a seat. When someone sits in it the sculpture is finished, and from across the lawn you are looking at a person inside a mind.

Nineteen people are already in there with them.

The idea

Our collective human memory is a multigenerational collection of minds, a vast collection that connects all of us through time, space and meaning. Our minds are the physical places where those memories live while we are here. We go on through the ideas and stories we hand over, which other people carry and hand on again.

Knowledge moves down a long line of people. Each generation sharpens what it was given and leaves an improved world to the next, which repeats the cycle.

I wanted a symbol for that, made of things anyone can read without a label. The outer form is the silhouetted profile of a child, which is the capacity to grow and to learn. The skull is cut with a Voronoi pattern, which is the connected form a network of neurons takes, and is also an ordinary piece of mathematics. The mind arrives at that shape and so does the equation.

Nineteen people

In the voids of that pattern are nineteen identifiable human silhouettes. They are not decoration and they are not generic. They are nineteen specific people.

Getting them was harder than designing them. I put out a call to people who used the library, and exactly one person answered. I photographed them there, with their permission. Everyone else was suspicious of a stranger asking for their portrait, which is a fair response to a stranger asking for your portrait.

So I asked the people I knew. I had moved to Austin in 2018 and this was 2019, so the list of people I could call on was short: friends I had made in a year, and family. I sent instructions and asked each of them to take a forward facing photograph of themselves and send it to me. They sent selfies. I traced and vectorized each one in Illustrator and built them into the CNC cut files.

Forward facing was the right choice for a reason I did not fully anticipate. A profile silhouette is instantly recognisable, which would have made the piece a row of portraits. Facing forward, the only defining edge is the outline of the hair, which is organic and irregular, and it disappears into the Voronoi. You have to look for a person to find one.

One of the nineteen is me. I have not said that publicly before.

So the pattern is a record of everyone I knew in Austin in 2019, which was not many, plus my family. The work argues that a mind is made of other people, and it was made out of the few other people I had.

Designed to travel

This began as a temporary commission for the City of Austin's TEMPO 2019 program, which meant it had to be installed, taken down and moved repeatedly by people who were not me.

So it is welded aluminum, powder coated in one flat color, built in three modules of basic geometry, about two hundred pounds in total. Simplicity and material strength were the brief. A single bold color reads from across a park and survives weather, hands and a decade of sun.

The form also had to invite people without instructions. It needed a visual language that lets a stranger approach without hesitation, and it needed to make the act of sitting a conscious physical thing rather than an accident.

Combining the sculptural form and the viewer makes the work an interactive space and an image the viewer completes by entering it.

The journey

It debuted at the SouthEast Branch Library and then moved to Edward Rendon Park for the TEMPO 2019 convergence during the East Austin Studio Tours. In 2020 it was exhibited at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin.

Then the pandemic. It was selected for Art al Fresco in Boerne in 2020, and the city withdrew the funding before it was installed. It was chosen for the Cedar Park sculpture garden, and pandemic technical difficulties put it into storage instead. Two selections, neither realized. A work built to travel spent most of two years not travelling.

It re-emerged in Houston, at Redbud Gallery's Richmond Avenue art trail, which paid an honorarium. Boerne and Cedar Park would have paid honoraria too, and paid nothing, because neither happened.

Then in January 2024 the City of Pflugerville acquired it for the Pflugerville Public Library. They paid the same figure the City of Austin had paid to commission it as a temporary work five years earlier, for a scope that asked far less of me, which makes the second transaction the better of the two.

Where it landed

A library is the right last stop, and it was not planned. The work argues that knowledge is held in people and passed between them, and it now sits outside a building that exists to do exactly that, in the city where it will stay.

Many of the nineteen came to see it during the temporary run. Some of them still go. A few now take their children, and show them which shape in the pattern is theirs.

That is the whole argument working the way it was supposed to, six years later and without me present. A person who gave me a selfie in 2019 standing in front of a sculpture outside a library, pointing at a silhouette, telling a child that is me.

What it was for

This was my first public commission, and it became my first permanent acquisition, which is backwards. I was selected in 2020 for the project that became *Two Live By A Star*, and that one did not complete until late 2024 and did not open until the summer of 2025. The temporary work turned permanent first.

It was also the swing back. I had been away from the art world through the biomedical engineering degree and the engineering jobs that followed it, and this was the thing that put me back in.

Welded aluminum, powder coated, modular three part structure. Approximately 70 x 56 x 59 in., approximately 200 lbs. Commissioned by the City of Austin Art in Public Places for TEMPO 2019. Acquired by the City of Pflugerville, January 2024, and installed at the Pflugerville Public Library.