Redoubling Wallpath

Lloyd Hamrol, 1972

This adobe sculpture is located on the North side of Visual Arts Center. Originally made up of nearly 1,000 burlap bags of earth and cement, this piece has gradually worn away to appear as the remains of an ancient ruin. It was a aquired through a joint venture between the National Endowment for the Arts through a grant for Art in Public Places and the Art Department. Hamrol was a visiting artist for the fall 1976 semester and students assisted with the installation.

This project was a joint venture between the National Endowment for the Arts through a grant for Art in Public Places and the CSUF Art Department. Hamrol was a visiting artist for the Fall 1976 semester and students assisted with the installation. Nearly 1000 burlap bags were filled with earth and cement to construct the original uneven wall of seven triangular shapes. Again the forms were geometric and the shapes and the public context of this work suggested monumental geometric architecture such as the pyramids. However in contrast to those monuments to the past this environmental sculpture was meant to be a place where people could sit, lean, climb or rest—a place that would be personally nourishing, protecting, and reinforcing. Because of these interactions with people and time the burlap bags have long since disappeared. Here the deterioration of time has sped up as the adobe structure continues to wear away more each year so that today the piece stands like other monuments of the past that have been swallowed by jungles or worn away in deserts by wind and sun.

Lloyd Hamrol (1937– ) earned his Masters degree from UCLA. He has concentrated on installations and site-specific works using non-art objects such as dry ice, adobe bricks, logs, stones, and sandbags. His work has been shown in major museums throughout the United States and he has completed a number of major outdoor site-specific sculptures including a river stone winding wall in the Anaheim Civic Center.