The power of Damián Ortega’s Magnetic Field resonates throughout the Robert Day Sciences Center, where it hangs high above the atrium.
At the sculpture’s official dedication in September, the audience gasped in collective amazement when CMC Life Trustee Christopher Walker ’69 described the Herculean effort to hoist—and then suspend—the 3,000-pound work 30 feet into the air.
Comprised of 18 rings of stainless-steel round bar, a stainless-steel sphere, and 1,476 colorful glass spheres of various sizes, the sculpture depicts a diagram of the Earth’s magnetic field—a shield that protects the planet from solar storms and its potent radiation, thus enabling life to thrive on our planet.
The dramatic artwork is among the latest additions to CMC's Walker Collection of Public Art, along with H£Rñ§ñ0H§L* by Anicka Yi and Jaume Plensa’s To JW Goethe (variant VIII), which are on display in the RDSC’s Quantum Library and the Agora, respectively.
“Being part of such a big and integral, meaningful project has been a privilege,” Ortega said.
“One of the most exciting parts of the project was seeing how people from many different countries were involved,” he added, noting how his materials and collaborations were “international in character,” from Canada, Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Mexico. “This shows the duality and diversity that shape the building.”
*Also a work of art meant to inspire interpretation and imagination, the title was generated through a machine-learning model trained on the artist's prior language with texts from poetry, marine biology, and quantum theory.