Thomas Sayre’s Flower Power

In a saga that has spanned four governors, a great recession, and a pandemic, the City of Oaks is finally gaining the grand park it deserves. When Gipson Play Plaza at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh opens in 2025, it will mark a major step in the realization of a vision over 20 years in the making.

But at the entrance to this future site of grass, flowers, and frolicking happy children stand two unforgiving steel structures: Duke Energy’s power poles. Each like a real-life Eye of Sauron, the utilitarian steel poles seem to suck the very joy out of the surrounding landscape. They can’t be moved—they and the land around them are owned by Duke Energy, not the city—and their sheer size means they can’t be ignored.

So when renowned Raleigh sculptor and painter Thomas Sayre was approached about turning the poles into giant sunflowers, he saw the challenge as an opportunity to turn the soulless into the spirited. Sayre has previously worked with tar, smoke, gunshots, welding material, earth, and fire, but never before has he collaborated with a team of Duke Energy engineers. When they’re unveiled this fall, Sayre hopes his metal sunflowers will be as delicate and awe-inspiring as the organic sunflowers that have come to symbolize Dix Park.

INDY: Tell me a little bit about this project.

SAYRE: [Dix Park] is a 100-year project. 

It’s not as big [as] Central Park, but it’s a huge bunch of land that Raleigh now owns and building it out will take decades. It’s an enormous project for which there is a master plan. And the first built piece of that master plan is the Gipson Play Plaza.

Gipson is a big project that’s basically a—playground is really selling it short—it’s a place for families, especially with kids, to gather, and there’s all kinds of stuff that’s artistic in nature that’s been under construction for a couple of years. In the course of thinking about the Gipson Play Plaza, some of the supporters of that project were concerned about the Duke Power lines along Lake Wheeler Road, which is right along the Play Plaza site. 

Those power lines—the poles—have some problems. One of them [is that they have]  a big footprint. They just take up a lot of real estate right where this Play Plaza is happening. And they have been kind of ratty looking. So the idea of making interesting power poles came about, and I was asked to take a look at it. My first reaction was, ‘This is owned by a utility, and utilities tend to not want to change the way they do things.’ But because of some pretty high-level people, all of a sudden there was an opening to doing some creative infrastructure. 

Another piece of this is Dix Park: Since Raleigh has taken over, one of the things they’ve done is planted sunflowers, and it’s become a part of their brand. People love the sunflowers and they’ve got enough land to make a really big sunflower patch every year. So some said, “Oh, how about sunflower power poles?”

As an artist, you know, I had a lot of questions about whether that’s a good idea or not, but what did appeal to me was the idea of making creative infrastructure. And I think that’s really what this is about. Is it artistic? Maybe. I’m not sure it’s Art with a capital A, it’s not something I would do as a commissioned artist with a blank slate, but it is something that I was willing and happy to do, and excited about doing as a way of taking something that’s pretty prosaic, a power pole, and making it into something delicate looking and reflective of the sun and changing in the sun and something that power poles just don’t do. 

But the doing of it was quite a challenge, because Duke is a utility, and they are responsible to the public, and it’s their right of way, they own the land. Ultimately, they will own the sunflowers, because it’s their power pole. So it’s been an interesting dance of teaching each other how to be creative.

You’ve mentioned the idea of “creative infrastructure.” What does that mean?

I make a living all over the country and beyond doing public work, public art, such as the Shimmer Wall downtown, or the earth-cast rings at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA). You come upon [the rings] on the bike path, and you think, especially in a museum, “Oh, this is art.” But as a society, we build a lot of stuff: bridges, roads, power poles, and other things that sometimes sink to a kind of prosaic utilitarian level. Does it have to be that way all the time? And I think the answer of the sunflowers is that it doesn’t.

Tell me a little bit about just the process of turning these two poles into sunflowers.

Well, go look at a power pole, especially a big one.

OK, I’m staring at a telephone pole outside my window right now.

What does it look like?

It looks like a big piece of wood with some metal pieces sticking out of it and some wires running through it.

OK. Well, that’s a pretty simple one, not high-voltage like the [Dix Park poles]. The way you transmit electricity is through three wires. When you’re transmitting, when you’re going a long distance, they break it apart into three phases. And that’s called three-phase power. Three-phase power is three sine waves that are 90 degrees out of phase. I could draw it for you really easily, but you’re just gonna have to imagine. The reason I’m telling you this is because on the petals themselves are perforations which depict the science of how three-phase power transmits across the landscape via power poles.

As a society, we build a lot of stuff: bridges, roads, power poles, and other things that sometimes sink to a kind of prosaic utilitarian level. Does it have to be that way all the time? And I think the answer of the sunflowers is that it doesn’t.”

If you were in a drone looking straight at the petals, if they were flattened out, you would see vividly these sine waves going around the circle, three sine waves that are out of phase by 90 degrees with each other. You’ll never see that from the ground because the petals are bent and leaning back and forth and twisting around, but there will be a plaque, I’m sure, that explains the science of this, which was very appealing to the Duke Energy engineers, who are real proud of electricity.

We are expressing a little of the science of power transmission, but we’re also making this very delicate-looking, like a flower is. How ironic to convert this prosaic structure into a flower. Duke Energy has all kinds of rules. The three wires have to be no closer than a very prescribed distance. And above the wires is a lightning wire that has to be a very prescribed distance, and the geometric relationship of the wires to the ground and to anything near them is all completely prescribed, and there’s no negotiation.

It was me and seven engineers. And at first, their response was “No, hell no,” about everything. And I had to, you know, be persuasive and say, “Here’s how we can do it, based on your own rules.” And eventually, they got won over.

What about crafting the petals?

The whole structure is a gigantic footing, 18 feet deep for each, and bolted into that footing is a big tapered pole that, then, the top of which receives a ring something like 20 feet in diameter.

Outward from that ring are 46 petals per sunflower. The petals structurally are each a two-inch pipe, which bolts to a bracket on the outside of this ring. And then bolted to that two-inch pipe is a folded cutout of stainless steel petal. Each one is in a different position, like in nature.

You’ve done a lot of work in Raleigh, where you live. Your piece outside the NCMA has even become the logo for the museum. Do you approach projects in Raleigh differently than you approach projects in other parts of the world?

The answer is yes and no. The approach isn’t different. I try to listen to the land, listen to the community, and understand the place where the project is, whether I’m in Thailand or California or Calgary, Canada. Since I have lived in Raleigh for a number of decades now, I do know this place pretty well, and that helps. When you work in Thailand, you swoop in for a while and get what you can get and go back and forth, but it’s not the same as living there.

Sometimes an outside person can see and sense things that a native can’t, you know; you can’t be a prophet in your own land, but you can be a prophet in somebody else’s land. Of all the ones, the dozens I’ve done all over the world, some of my favorite pieces are here, because I can see what they’re doing and how they’re working and that people, after years, continue to get something out [of them].

Are there any other works, either by you or by others, that you feel these sunflower poles particularly engage with, build on, or converse with?

When Duke was approached about making sunflower power poles, they immediately said, “Oh, you mean, like the Mickey Mouse ears in Orlando, Florida?” There is a power pole there that has the circle and the two ears. The sunflowers are much more complicated and, I would say, more visually striking than that. I think there’s another power pole project near a big NFL site in the Midwest that is a goalpost. But in terms of engineering and visual complexity, the Mickey Mouse ears and the goalpost are just way simpler than two sunflowers with 46 petals each.

I’m looking at the Mickey Mouse ears, and it’s a little more dystopian.

It’s not my fave.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that’s important to know for this story and this project?

There’s a uniqueness to this project. It’s different because it has to conform to all the Duke rules. It’s an incredibly narrow wicket, creatively, to have to go through. Now, is it more or less creative? I don’t know. If I was approached as a sculptor—“Hey, what would you do here at the same site?”—I’d have a very different response. It’s just a different enterprise. And because of these seven engineers and all their well-founded hesitancy, because their responsibility is to keep the public safe, I think a lot of artists would just freak out and say this is cramping my creative self.

I see it more like the difference between free verse and sonnets in poetry. Sonnets are very prescribed—here’s a formula—versus free verse, where there are no rules. This is much more like a sonnet. Is free verse more or less creative than a sonnet? I don’t think so, but they are very different, and they express different things.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].