Alice Aycock
[1] She subsequently moved to New York City and obtained her Master of Arts in 1971 from Hunter College, where she was taught and supervised by sculptor and conceptual artist Robert Morris.
Installed on Gibney Farm near New Kingston, Pennsylvania, Maze is thirty-two feet in diameter and constructed of five six-foot high concentric wooden rings with three openings through which the viewer could enter.
Aycock was inspired by the axial alignment of a compass as well as author Jorge Luis Borges's essay, "Pascal's Sphere," which presents the idea that the center of the universe is located wherever the perceiver is standing.
[6]Additional works like Low Building with Dirt Roof (1973) and A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels(1975) involved the sculpting of natural landscapes by inserting manmade structures into the ground.
Her sculptures now excluded viewer participation and looked more like theatrical stage sets; and explored combinations of science, technology, and spirituality.
[10] The Machine That Makes the World (1979) reiterated this shift and marked the beginning of Aycock's work in large-scale sculptures and public installations over the next several decades.
[14] In addition to the physical structure of How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts, Aycock also created a hand-colored photoengraving, produced in 1981, which depicts a diagram of the artwork.
With its obsessive erudition, Aycock's art of cosmic machines has again been compared to Borges's stories which involve private metaphysics of the mind, dreams, space, and time.
Like Borges, Aycock provokes a fear of an existing and ultimately incomprehensible higher order that man makes endless attempts to understand.
She has had two major retrospectives—the first surveyed her work between 1972 and 1983, and was organized by the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, and the other, a retrospective entitled "Complex Visions," was curated by the Storm King Art Center.
In September 2005, The MIT Press published the artist’s first hardcover monograph, entitled Alice Aycock, Sculpture and Projects, authored by Robert Hobbs.
Other notable works include a GSA commission for the Fallon Building in Baltimore; an outdoor piece entitled Strange Attractor at the Kansas City International Airport; Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks in Nashville, Tennessee; and a floating sculpture for Broward County, Florida.
