From: "David H Bailey" <dhbailey@lbl.gov> Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 07:55:07 -0800
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43083-2002Dec11.html Running Out Of Time, Space Math-Inspired Artist Under Eviction Threat By Eugene L. Meyer Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page B01 Helaman Ferguson is having a bad day in his unheated studio/barn. His 10-year-old compressor has died; the repairman says it's beyond fixing. The earliest December snowstorm in 20 years is about to delay the hauling of his nine-ton granite sculpture to a corporate client outside Philadelphia. To top it off, his landlord has declared him a squatter and is evicting him from the old dairy barn he converted -- and has toiled in for four years -- at the Maryland Science and Technology Center in Bowie. Others in Bowie regard Ferguson, 62, as a national treasure. He is the Tech Center's unofficial artist in residence, a world-renowned research mathematician who uses three-dimensional computer-imaging to turn algorithms into sculpture. His work has been exhibited in major cities, and he has received national awards. People from all over the world come to Bowie to see the 45-ton granite fountain he created from a formula devised 800 years ago by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, better known as Fibonacci. "Math is my design language," said Ferguson, a tall, lanky man with a trimmed white beard who also holds a world's record of sorts for juggling while jogging 50 miles. In the drafty barn, near two large granite pieces, equations are scrawled on sheets of insulation and a chalkboard. The classical music he listens to while he works can be heard hundreds of yards away, blaring from inside the barn across the snowscape. Ferguson's predicament is the latest wrinkle in the saga of the 466-acre office park at Routes 50 and 301. Formerly affiliated with the University of Maryland, it remains largely undeveloped after two decades, having suffered through economic downturns, political problems and foreclosures that landed two former developers in jail. The land for the office park is under covenants that limit development to research and technology tenants. But Ferguson, who was working in the basement and garage of his Howard County home, negotiated the use of the barn a few years ago. Ferguson had been hired by one of the park's handful of tenants, the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank affiliated with the National Security Agency. In return for rights to the barn, which he spent $80,000 converting into a studio, he agreed to design and build the fountain that sits in the middle of a reservoir at the center, dubbed Lake Fibonacci. He has worked since without a written agreement but with an unwritten pledge from one of the property owners that he could stay while completing his other large granite pieces. "He's the most determined guy I know. He's done some wonderful things," said Dean Morehouse, the Tech Center partner who suggested to Ferguson that he use the barn. Morehouse spent "a little over $500,000" on the fountain, which paid for materials, some equipment and 28 concrete pilings driven into the reservoir floor. Two years ago, Morehouse sold his managing stake in the Tech Center and about half the property -- including the barn -- to the Baltimore-based MIE Co., a builder of office parks and shopping centers. MIE specializes in warehouse-style "flex space," which is what it wants to build where the barn is. Ferguson was given until September to complete his work and leave. When the deadline came, he said he needed more time and MIE let him stay until the end of the year. Now, he is between an 11-ton rock -- his latest commission, from Macalester College in Minnesota -- and a hard place. The new property owners say they will turn off his electric service at the end of this month and then tear down the barn. "He's not staying there," said Ramon Benitez, MIE's development manager. "He's, frankly, a squatter at this point." Ferguson is no typical squatter. The piece he has just finished but not yet delivered to pharmaceutical giant Merck, an abstract sculpture of hands almost shaking, drew a commission "in the low six figures," Ferguson said. Without being told, a viewer would not know its mathematical origins. Ferguson starts with a mathematical equation or theorem, usually of his own design. He uses computers and stereoscopic perspective to translate it into a three-dimensional image, which he then projects onto a block of stone. With a variety of tools -- huge milling machines, water-spouting diamond saws, hammer and chisel -- Ferguson turns the block into its final form. The fountain on Lake Fibonacci is based on a 13th-century mathematical problem: Starting with one newborn pair of rabbits, how many pairs of rabbits will you have after a year if each pair begets another pair every month from the pair's second month on? (Each pair has to wait a month to begin reproducing.) Fibonacci's solution involves a numerical sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc.) in which each number is the sum of the preceding two. Place those numbers on a chart, and you have the design of the fountain. The 18-foot-tall sculpture (official name: "Fibonacci Fountain: Essential Singularity II") resembles a graph curve, rising from an elongated foundation with 14 jets of water shooting up from the base. It is lit up at night. "For me," Ferguson said, "it's taking these math forms no one's ever seen, felt or touched and bringing them into where they can be seen and felt and touched." Audrey E. Scott, the former Prince George's County Council member and three-term Bowie mayor, is among those who have tried to help him stay. She recalled a meeting with Benitez: "I said, 'You have here on your premises at no cost to you a national treasure, and it seems to me you would be going out of your way to capitalize on this gift you inherited.' But they don't see it that way." Ferguson keeps chipping away at the granite and the problem. MIE had said he could rent some of its flex-space, but then decided that his work would be too noisy and messy for adjoining tenants. Morehouse and Robert G. Depew, both limited partners with MIE, still own other land at the Tech Center and have told Ferguson that he could relocate to their property. Ferguson considered, then rejected moving the barn as too costly. He is now thinking of building a new barn on a site Depew owns at the Tech Center, he said, but he has no idea how to pay for it or what it would cost. "If somebody comes along with a big fat commission, that's where the funding comes from," Ferguson said. "Needless, to say, I've been beating the bushes." And then there is the problem of what to do with all his material and equipment on Jan. 1. So far, he said, he has no answer but to hope for "another reprieve." (c) 2002 The Washington Post Company