Campus Sculptures: Windows in the Bubble

Most liberal arts colleges tend to be accused of being bubbles with a designed separation from the world; to protect from the harshness of “real life” and offer a safe space to test out ideas. But this also entails that one could easily carry out their day to day lives at these colleges without any knowledge of the outside world. Wrapped up in their immediate daily routines of classes, sleep, food, and friends, it is quite possible to mark the ends of your relevant world at the end of the campus grounds.

Davidson College is no exception to that, set at the edge of woods with a soft bustle of market life along Main Street, the campus and its community can feel like a completion in itself. So when I was thinking about semester abroad, I hoped to seek something different that would bring a break in this setting and entrench myself with my academia in the life of a city. Decision: I decided to go near London.

The experience was expectedly radically different. The college was immersed in the city but the city itself was so much more. In the short period I was there, there was no getting accustomed to things because every day there were new places to get lost in.

So, when I came across the sculptural figure of WE by Jaume Plensa outside the London Bridge station the sense of familiarity felt misplaced. Home was nowhere near in any sense of the word, but the jagged edges of the metal and the cool steel gave me a much-needed sense of comfort in my foreign setting. I had passed a similar fusion of alphabets into a human form every day on my way to class at Davidson — Waves III. Its open front gave me the feeling of a protective cocoon instead of a metal prison. Placed in two radically different places separated by a vast ocean, the sculpture still managed to provide me comfort.

As a part of my cultural immersion, I had hoped to understand the big American and British difference, something that went beyond an oedipal complex, but this somehow surpassed it. I was suspended for a moment with the body of the sculpture as my focal point. Placed outside a train station, its presence took on a completely different meaning. Whereas on campus the form radiates as an evocation of knowledge, in the masses of the station it resonates of anonymity and subjectivity. But its presence superseded the intellectual project of art for me and reveled in an emotional one.

It was not a simple matter of replication. I have of course seen visual replications before. We live in a world of logos where “A Coke is a Coke”¹ everywhere no matter who sees it and no matter where you see it. In our modern world, familiarity is easy to gain if one is only looking for replication. And besides, I have seen images of said art over and over again, but no, physically standing in the presence of the work rooted me there, and frustration and comfort started coexisting the longer I gazed at the sculpture. By the end of my time in the UK, I will have visited this sculpture twice more and each time it would feel like a personal secret, a reminder of home.

Later, I was lucky to visit Magdalena Abakanowicz’s exhibit Every Tangle of Thread and Rope at Tate Modern in London. It beckoned me to Abakanowicz’s The Group of Ten that I pass every day on my way to the library. Traveling to Scotland, I spotted the Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North on the highway skyline and thought of all the times I would absent mindedly gaze at You while trying to draft the perfect conclusion for my paper.

There is a deep emphasis on the small-town localness of Davidson, but the sculptures now suddenly feel like participation in a much bigger dialogue: the works situated in the daily scenery of the campus motion to both the here and beyond. It is not to say that everything else is opaque (it, after all, is a bubble… the walls are translucent) but the art on campus acts like designated sites, windows, meant to be looked out of (or into?), compelling you to contemplate, pause, consider, and reflect.

– Toshaani Goel ’24