of art & design
by Kate Dobbs Ariail
The Gregg Museum’s exhibition of Thomas Sayre’s recent work in two contrasting formats will answer some questions about the prolific and sometimes puzzling Raleigh artist, and provide fresh insights into his public artworks. Sayre’s designs, large-scale sculpture and public artworks are installed worldwide, from Atlanta to Portland, from Turkey to Thailand. But Sayre does not suffer the fate of many artists, who thrive in the larger world, while remaining unknown in their hometowns. His work has been shown frequently throughout the state, and some of his permanently installed outdoor pieces have become Raleigh landmarks.
The gleaming marble World Wall at Marbles Kids Museum was created by him. In the sculpture park of the North Carolina Museum of Art, his enormous earth-cast Gyre dominates a long vista with its three rough rings. The deceptively quiet Pas de Chat, a sleek pool with fountain and stacked granite light tower, transforms the plaza fronting the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts. The lightly dancing oak tree imagery of Shimmer Wall, designed in collaboration with Ned Kahn, on the city’s new convention center nearby, became an icon before it was even completed in 2008.
Yet Sayre remains something of a mystery to Raleigh and the greater Research Triangle area, where more of his work emerges from the landscape, as well as floors, walls and ceilings. Did the same artist create such different pieces? The works in this exhibition seemingly present an even greater variety.
Thomas Sayre is co-founder, along with architect Steve Schuster, of the
Raleigh design firm Clearscapes. Within this framework and along with his
partner and the infrastructure business provides, he has been able to work
at the scale of architecture, creating spaces and objects in a sculptural
manner while solving design problems. The scope of these large projects for
public buildings has made Sayre adept at working in the landscape with purely
sculptural objects that can meet the landscape on its terms. Whatever the
setting, the relative size of the object or objects is always carefully calibrated,
as is the relationship among any grouped elements. Matters of scale, balance,
perspective and spacing drive both the designed places and the individual
large works – just as they drive the objects in this exhibition.
“The public art stuff weaves in and out of what’s not public art,” says Sayre. The relatively small earth-cast sculptures in the Gregg exhibition continue his interest in earthmoving tools and the earth they dig. “I have a place where I can roam around with heavy equipment,” he says, smiling. For this work, he hired a tree-spade operator to dig holes with the powerful hydraulic spade, which cleanly removes the plug of soil. He then made a positive cast of each hole in concrete, the outer surface of which records the particular nature of the earth in which it was cast, while the shape repeats the conic form of the steel spade. “There’s time, geological time in the hole,” says Sayre, which is mapped on the sculpture’s skin. The act of earth-casting “is a balance between nature-made and human intervention.”
The exhibition’s wall work echoes formal concerns that have been present in Sayre’s oeuvre for at least 25 years, but these glowing “paintings” of chalk and hot steel on Masonite come directly out of a powerful personal experience. He’d given a presentation in Denver that hadn’t, he thought, gone well. It was very cold. He drove, then hiked up into the mountains, on black ice, seeing no one, struggling past a lake, past another lake, going up and up, following bear tracks. Near the tree line, the sun burst out, illuminating the last of the aspens. “I had a vision,” he says, simply. He returned to Raleigh and began the series on New Year’s Day, 2008, summoning the spiritual force he had felt by drawing with a wire-feed welder’s fiery tip, burning ineradicable marks in the shape of aspen trunks.
Thomas Sayre is “an artist and a designer,” says Dr. Charlotte V. Brown,
director of the Gregg 
Museum, “and he makes humanistic work.” The comprehensive
nature of this humanism has merged his visually disparate explorations into
a cohesive body of art over time. Sayre’s physical objects express his passionate
engagement with poetry and astronomy; with music and geometry; with images
and architecture – with cosmology and philosophy. “I’m at my best as a human
when making this work,” says Sayre. “The artwork is part of a larger spiritual
pursuit of balance.”
Kate Dobbs Ariail has written widely on art and culture in the Southeast for numerous publications since 1988. She lives in Durham, NC and Washington, DC.