Commissioned by the City of Gainesville, Florida, Blue Spiral is my first public art project. The design is inspired by the fossil rich limestones of Florida. Like the process of discovering a seashell embedded in an ancient rock, a nautilus shape in the patio emerges to the eye slowly. The intersecting lines suggest water steadily wearing away the matrix surrounding the fossil, stone slowly giving up its secrets. I used several types of stone, accenting color and texture in the final piece. The patio is dry laid over sand; there’s no cement or grout. It is installed in a public courtyard at the new campus of the Gainesville Regional Utilities.

All the stones I used were sedimentary and had amazing textures, including ‘worm stone’, visible here as three points of the pinwheel with fossilized tracks of some prehistoric creature moving around in the ooze.

I rented a shop space near Biltmore Village and generated an astounding amount of dust over the course of a month of cutting and shaping the stones. I drew the design in the computer and had life sized templates printed by Henco Reprographics, my favorite local blueprint shop. I cut each shape out of the paper and used that to guide the cutting, which was all done with a five inch Makita grinder. Did I mention the dust…

As I cut each stone and added it to the design I would check it off the ‘map’. I would color ahead a few stones at a time, trying to balance the color and texture with the available stones and the size of the remaining pieces.

I packed the whole thing onto six pallets and had to freighted to Gainesville. I spent three days installing it, taking a short break one morning to talk with a class of landscape architecture students of the University of Florida.