Four Canoes

Helaman Ferguson sculpted Four Canoes as the keystone outdoor piece located in the quadrangle bordered by two new "wet" and "dry" science and engineering buildings at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Installed in September 1997, this granite sculpture includes a plaza of alternating red and black hexagonal tiles, two hexagonal prisms rising from the plaza, and two three dimensional non-orientable double cross cap toroidal forms resting on the prisms.

Six feet in diameter, the toroidal forms weigh three tons each, and stand linked upon the prisms, as if to span the gap between. Each toroid can be thought of as two canoes sewn together and bent round. Translated past and rotated through one another, these two double canoe Klein bottle forms– solid granite toroids with double cross-caps, couple inextricably– mysteriously.

Twenty-eight serrated-edge hexagons, each three feet in diameter, tile the plaza. Whether or not the double canoe hexagonal tiles cover the plane in an aperiodic tiling in the sense of Penrose, is an unsolved problem, this intensifies the mystery of the sculpture.

Cold Spring Granite quarried and cut the granite.

Installation of Four Canoes occured in September 1997. The piece presented a tremendous technical challenge: how to marry the two Klein Bottles. Moving a three ton object, which has a built-in tendency to roll, is no trivial matter.

photos by sam ferguson