For Maya Lin, the artist and architect best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, having a connection to time is a fundamental theme of her work.
As she demonstrated to a nearly full Page Auditorium Oct. 22, much of her art is inspired by a strong awareness of the immediate time period.
"My works present a tense of space interaction without outside influence," she said, showing slides of several of her pieces.
"It deals with what it means to be connected to time... an immediacy of experience," Lin added.
She described the Vietnam Memorial as an example of this time awareness, explaining that the purpose of the monument was "to create a memory so returning veterans could remember a specific time and place in their lives..., because forgetting history is so dangerous."
The memorial, she said, is like "a book left out in public... a work to provide intimate experience."
She also explained that the size of the names on the monument were scaled to the print size of words in a book to recreate for the war veterans the sensation of reading a chapter of their lives.
Lin, who was 21 when she received the commission in 1981, added that her relative youth and inexperience helped shape her work on the Vietnam monument: "I was idealistic," she said.
"Age saved me from fear...," Lin explained. "I had no preconceived biases."
In addition to discussing the Vietnam Memorial, Lin presented a slide show of many of her past and current works, including a sculpture dedicated to Yale University women, a landscape project for the Charlotte Coliseum and a courtyard designed for the Academy of Rome.
Her future projects include a time capsule for the millennium and a new sculpture for the Stanford University School of Engineering.
For many of these works, she said, she achieved a connection with time by surrounding herself with nature.
"The aerial view of earth, the patterns of water waves and sand are all very inspirational to me," Lin said.
Lin, a Yale School of Architecture graduate who has won countless national awards, said she did not always expect to be an artist.
"I was such a science and math nerd in high school," she joked to the audience, adding that she did not become interested in the arts until college. She said she eventually reconciled the two competing interests through architecture, "the perfect balance between art and science."
In a question-and-answer session after Lin's speech, an audience member asked about her mentors.
"My parents are my teachers," she responded. "My father [makes ceramics]..., my mother is a writer.... Both had tremendous impact on me."
She explained that her father's profession contributed to her love for the earth, while her mother's writing influenced her artistic expression.
Lin concluded by giving advice to aspiring artists: "Artistic creation is a personal search," she said. "Try not to force yourself to think about timelessness, but [instead about] the relevant things in your time period.... Know what comes before you, but do not be fixated by it.... Always ask yourself why you are doing it."
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