The press release for the sculptor Susumu Shingu's "Wind Caravan" project opens charmingly with a quote from Christina Rossetti: "Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I, but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is blowing by."
Rossetti is not alone in noting what may be the obvious to other more prosaic souls: The wind blows, things move. Japanese sculptor Susumu Shingu, 62, who initially trained as a painter in Italy in the early 1960s, became fascinated with the movement of wind and water after hanging a painting on a tree to photograph. At first irritated by the wind blowing the picture this way and that, he soon found himself so mesmerized by the spinning that it became his life's work to invent mechanisms with which to capture the action of air and water.
"For more than 30 years," Shingu says, "I have been making sculptures which move by the natural energies of wind and water -- the most characteristic phenomena of our planet. My sculptures are made with the most advanced skills of technology and include delicately balanced parts and precise rotation systems with bearings.