Amber Waves is a celebration of the bounty American landscape,
referencing Katharine Lee Bates' patriotic hymn, "America the
Beautiful."
The lamp presents agriculture scenes from Washington State,
Oklahoma, Iowa, and Kansas.
Each location was chosen to juxtapose natural and manmade
features, setting the inevitable course of rivers and rocks
against human efforts to manage and harness the land
through roads, land sections, and pivot irrigation.
My favorite moment in the lamp is in the bottom right corner
of the Oklahoma panel, where lines of dense vegetation march
across the road from one field to its neighbor.
These lines arise along porous strata and cracks in the sedimentary
bedrock, through which water and minerals seep to the surface to
nourish the plants.
The design for each panel is traced by hand from satelite imagery
from the European Space Agency's Sentinel 2 constellation.
Fields that grow tall in one season are harvested in the next;
what shines bright at one wavelength of light is dark in another.
As such, each panel is based on eight to ten distinct images.
This forms a portrait of the land over a year.
