Sculptor Gary Bates takes his cues from the land

(This article was originally published in The Belgrade News)

By Ray Sikorski


“I don’t use mathematics on this stuff. I use physical weight, the actual weight,” said Amsterdam sculptor Gary Bates, explaining the process behind his large kinetic sculptures.

Bates said that to find the balance point of an object, he’ll pick it up with a punch on a big jack, or put it on a balance beam to find its actual center of gravity. He confessed that before building a piece, he has only an inkling of how it might act.

“The reason I build these pieces is to find out what they do. I don’t have the answer. I have the question,” he said. “I guess you could call it visual research, to see how these forms will react to nature.”

Is the soft-spoken artist an engineer? There’s no hesitation in his answer: “No.”
Then, after a pause: “Farmboy.”

Known locally for the giant wind-powered sculpture that twirls elegantly outside Montana State University’s Engineering building (it’s named the “Wind Arc,” but Bates doesn’t mind that most everybody refers to it as the “Noodle”), Bates was raised on the same wheat and barley farm that he currently resides. He spent a large part of his life tractoring that field, and it became the main inspiration for his work.

“Every afternoon it seemed the winds would come up, and that would kind of wreck the day for me when you’re out driving an open tractor,” he said. “So I would build sculptures that I put on the edges of the fields to entertain me while the wind was blowing. So that’s why the sculptures are big; so I could see them a mile away.”

Bates’ first sculptures used abandoned machinery that he found around the farm; one of his earliest works was an homage to the windmill water pumps that dotted the area in his youth. That same spirit inspired later works, such as “Will He Drill,” made from a potato auger and parts of a wrecked train, which spins outside the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings. And Bates gained notoriety in the early ‘90s for his “Lunar Ketcherschmitt,” which was in the running to grace Bozeman’s northern entrance on North Seventh Avenue. Two half cylinders made from a giant boiler, with the top one rotating on the axis of the bottom one, the sculpture was dubbed the “Soup Can” and Bates lost out on the commission.

“I never look back,” Bates said. “Everybody’s lost a public commission; it’s just the nature of the business. Public sculpture is always controversial, and you hope it is because that means someone saw it.”

Bates is optimistic about a proposal he’s made for the new Bozeman library: a 48-foot tall stainless steel kinetic structure for that uses the wind coming off the top of the building to do “somersaults and pirouettes.” He’ll receive news of whether it’s been accepted later this year.
Right now Bates is most enthusiastic about his current project, commissioned by Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington. Called “Rain Scale,” it’s comprised of a massive horizontal stainless steel ring sitting atop a steel-pipe arch. When it rains — as it often does in Auburn — the weight of just 3/8-inches of rainwater will tip the 2000-pound ring into a seesawing motion for 50 minutes, depositing the water into the pond below.

“I think of my pieces as receptors of information from the land, and then transmit it back in a visual way,” he said.
“These are built to heighten people’s awareness … of the world; that there’s something going on beyond the day-to-day stuff that we’re in. If you watch any of these pieces, you’ll get an appreciation for what’s going on on the surface of this planet.”