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A Midterm Meditation Garden is on exhibit in the Williams Center lobby this week.
Symposium (1987/1997), a meditative sculpture installation by Japanese-born, California-based artist Mineko Grimmer, creates “chance sounds” as pebbles and water drop from a suspended, melting pyramid of pebbles in ice, through bamboo branches, into a shallow pool below.
The musical, “chance sound” nature of Grimmer’s work lends itself to collaboration with avant-garde musicians and performers. In 1990, John Cage created a work for one of her installations. Williams Center visitors may remember her collaboration with electroacoustic musician Carl Stone in Ten Vessels at the Williams Center art gallery in 1998. Stone created Los Jarritos, a musical component for Grimmer’s installation of chance sound “instruments” using ice mounded in the lids of tall, low-fired pots from Oaxaca, Mexico.
The Midterm Meditation Garden also includes Not All Who Wander Are Lost, a 20-foot concentric labyrinth painted on velour. The labyrinth is a millennia-old symbol found in many cultures around the world. Whether in spiritual or secular use, the labyrinth seems to symbolize the path to be followed, however long and complex, to reach the goal, the object of the quest, at the center. Visitors are encouraged to walk the labyrinth and explore this ancient tool for focused meditation.
The Midterm Meditation Garden is co-sponsored by the Williams Center art gallery and the Lafayette College Arts Society.