A gentle breeze was whirling and spinning all the things to be whirled and spun! There were massive, colorful sculptures in every direction. The sound of rhythmic buzzing and clanging filled the air. The Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in Wilson, North Carolina was alive with kinetic energy!
You’d be forgiven if your mind’s eye jumps to a field of simple pinwheels and rustic wind toys such as the yellow cow whirligig pictured below. A whirligig is, after all, a very simple thing—an object that spins or whirls.
The whirligigs showcased in the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park are, however, anything but simple. They are large, complex and brilliant kinetic sculptures. Vollis Simpson (1919–2013) created “monumental, fanciful, wind-driven creations … [which] have been appreciated by millions of people in art museums and other venues. In 2013 they were named North Carolina’s official folk art.” explains the Whirligig Park’s website. The park showcases 30 of Vollis Simpson’s “most colossal and impressive sculptures.”
At first glance, the 2-acre park appears rather chaotic.
The impression of chaos, however, is peeled away as you wander through the park and look up to study the sculptures.
Each sculpture bears further examination. First, there’s the size. The piece pictured below, known as Mule Train, is the heaviest whirligig on display. It weighs 6.75 tons which is about as heavy as an African bush elephant. Astonishingly, that massive structure is balanced on, and turns around, a single pivot point!
It’s impossible to tell when you’re looking up at them but the mules, cart and driver are life-size.
This section, from the original version, provides a different perspective. It is on display in the Whirligig Museum at the park.
“A kinetic vane that instead of just turning the whirligig into the wind, turned the wind into a storyteller” is how author Jefferson Currie eloquently described this whirligig in the 2014 South Writ Large article, Portfolio: Vollis Simpson Whirligigs, which he co-wrote with Vollis Simpson himself.
Mule Train “consists of a team of mules that simply pulls a wagon, although the engineering and mechanics that he put into the piece make it special. When the front wheel engages the drive, the drive moves the legs on each of the mules, while also wagging the mule ears. As the beasts walk forward, the wheels on the wagon spin and the man perched on his bench seat at the front of the wagon moves his arm in a motion that mimics the light whipping of the mule team, pushing them forward on their journey. The effect is such that the entire piece seems to be moving forward while stationary in the air. … there is a playful elegance about [Mule Train] that is comforting … ground[ed] in time and place and how Vollis grew up, moving buildings with his father with a team of mules or working the farm when he was growing up.”
The museum shares this insight about “The man behind the ‘gigs. Born in 1919 to a farming family with twelve children, young Vollis Simpson helped his father supplement the family income by moving houses. More attracted to the farm machinery than to tending crops, Vollis learned to service the tractors, bailers, threshers, pumps and implements that defined a working farm. Simpson retired in his sixties and, using some of the same rigs he had developed for moving houses, began constructing enormous whimsical windmills in his yard.”
This photo wall, featuring newspaper articles about Vollis Simpson, is prominently displayed in the museum.
I was intrigued to learn the first pieces Simpson made actually did have specific functional purposes. For instance, he built his first windmill during World War II while serving with the US Army Air Corps in the South Pacific. “The isolated troops struggled to keep uniforms clean so Simpson experimented with rudimentary windmill technology using a junked B-29 bomber to power a large washing machine.” says the Whirligig Park website.
This story points to several enduring aspects of Simpson’s work. For one, there is the ingenuity of the undertaking—how does one engineer a large-scale washing machine driven by wind-power? Then there’s the challenge of building something new from existing parts—of making the pieces fit and work in ways they were never intended. Interestingly, the repurposing of scrapped materials was the impetus for Simpson’s work when he first decided to build “a few windmills and kinetic sculptures using the metal and other materials he had around the shop and his house” reports Currie. “When asked why he started building windmills, Vollis said, ‘I had a lot of material left over and I didn’t want to junk it or salvage it. I put most of it out there in the pasture.” The pasture, where the whirligigs were installed before they were moved to downtown Wilson, was located beside Simpson’s machinery repair shop on the family farm in Lucama, North Carolina.
This insight turns a visit to the Whirligig Park into a bit of a treasure hunt as you scan for parts and pieces you recognize.
Simpson’s commitment to reusing materials is illustrated by Caroline, one of his works on display at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina. The unfinished work is the last, large-scale whirligig Simpson created—in 2012 at the age of 93. The artist exhibit card reads: “Polychrome steel, propellers, lamp domes, dishwasher cutlery cups, milk shake blender cups, fuel filter housings, mower blades, agricultural implement wheel, bicycle wheel, casters, ventilator domes and various sheet metal animal cutouts featuring moose, duck and squirrel.” The structure is over 27 feet high, 26 feet long and 80 inches deep.
The Cameron Art Museum is not the only art museum exhibiting Simpson’s work. In fact, it was Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, an affluent art lover and founder of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland, who is credited with shining the light on Simpson’s work in the 1990s. “She had visited … [Simpson] in Lucama and was attracted by the grand scale of his larger works, and by their complexity and precise engineering.” reports the Whirligig Park’s website.
In light of the American Visionary Art Museum’s mission to become “the official national museum, education center, and repository for intuitive, self-taught artistry”, Hoffberger’s decision to include Simpson’s whirligigs seems inevitable. He was commissioned to create the signature piece for the new museum. The result was a red, white and blue kinetic sculpture called Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness described as “a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that … towers outside the museum.”
“A whirligig of whirligigs” is an apt description for most of the works in the Whirligig Park. Even the more straightforward pieces, such as BBB Blue Star pictured below, include multiple whirligigs.
Another trait of Simpson’s signature style is the use of reflective cutouts. As illustrated in the Whirligig Museum, “Vollis cut road signs into thousands of pieces, often shaped like stars or triangles, to cover his whirligigs.” When Simpson’s sculptures were moved from the Simpson farm to Whirligig Park “each of those pieces [was] carefully replaced with new reflective material.”
The reflective pieces transform the kinetic sculptures after dark. At the Simpson farm, the headlights of passing cars would shine on all those moving reflectors creating a spectacle the locals came to call Acid Park. Nowadays at Whirligig Park, “specialty night lighting illuminates the thousands of reflectors attached to the whirligigs, recreating the mystical experience at the original location”. I didn’t have the opportunity to visit the whirligigs after dark but it’s definitely something I’d like to see.
When you look closely, you can pick out the reflectors on, Saw Dog, the piece pictured below. Every triangle, every star, every outline is studded with reflectors. Just imagine them shimmering and shining as they spin and turn in reflected light!
Saw Dog is also a great example of the energetic movement Simpson built into his whirligigs. When the wind turns the giant propellor, the two men move forward and back, leaning in and out to grip the crosscut saw, sawing the log while the white dog looks on with his tail wagging.
“A fascinating technical challenge to whirligig makers is the transformation of circular motion into reciprocating motion.” report the authors of the book Playing with the Wind: The Whirligig Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. “Any activity involving a back-and-forth motion is an ideal subject for whirligig artisans. Whirligigs also provide good opportunities to represent traditional activities such as cutting wood, milking cows, pumping water, and even fishing.” Or guitar playing, as illustrated by Simpson’s Guitar Player pictured below. You can sneak a peek at the mechanisms which make the musician appear to strum his guitar on the back of the figure.
The flapping wings of Simpson’s Flying Duck, pictured below, provide another example of reciprocating motion.
“Because it’s a mechanism for utilizing and applying wind power, the mechanical whirligig is a machine. By some definitions it might also be called an engine, since it converts wind energy into mechanical power. Using cams, gears, or wheels, this type of whirligig changes the rotary motion of the propeller into vertical or horizontal movement, which then makes figures and objects move by means of connecting rods or wires.” explains author Andres S Lunde in his book Whirligigs: Design and Construction. “Building a new mechanical whirligig usually takes some time … adjustments and changes will undoubtedly be necessary. Half the fun lies in solving the many engineering problems which are inevitable with these fascinating whirligigs.”
If “half the fun lies in solving the engineering problems”, then I can only assume Simpson had a great deal of fun building the piece known as V. SIMPSON. Many consider this kinetic sculpture to be his biggest achievement and, perhaps Simpson did as well since, it’s the only one he signed.
Astonishingly, “the piece has more than sixty-five moving parts … [it] is a 4500-pound, 55-feet-long cacophonous assemblage of bicycle wheels, stainless steel sheet metal, HVAC fans, stainless steel stove pipe, planes turned from wooden sign posts, textile mill rollers, aluminum cups, school bus mirrors, a bicycle frame, circular roof vents, sheet metal, truck hubs, and road signs cut and shaped into stars, triangles, rectangles, and fan blades to cover every available surface” reports author Currie.
It’s nearly impossible to comprehend all the parts of V SIMPSON, let alone imagine how anyone could actually build it!
“What Vollis was doing mechanically, creatively and artistically is unparalleled. … He worked on a scale that was a lot larger than anyone else. And even in that scale, he had a lot of intricacy. And I think that’s one of the things people recognized.” Jefferson Currie is quoted as saying in the 2013 WRAL News article, Whirligig Art Creator Vollis Simpson Dies at 94. “They also saw the whimsy and the happiness in his pieces. They told stories — stories of community, of his time in World War II, of his love of airplanes. People who see them for the first time, there’s this sense of wonder, and it’s kind of overwhelming. It’s hard to get your head around how one man could create all of this.”
More Info
You may also be interested in the previous FanningSparks’ blog post which addresses a related subject. Which Way is the Wind Blowing? provides a brief, entertaining study of weather vanes.
The Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park and Museum is located in the small town of Wilson in eastern North Carolina. The 2-acre park is free and open from 5:00am to midnight every day. You can learn more about the park on the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park website.
The following resources were consulted in the writing of this article:
. Portfolio: Vollis Simpson Whirligigs, 2014 South Writ Large article by Jefferson Currie and Vollis Simpson
. Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills, 2010 New York Times Article by Scott Shane
. Whirligig Art Creator Vollis Simpson Dies at 94, 2013 WRAL News Article
. Playing with the Wind: The Whirligig Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization book, which is available here on Internet Archive.
. Whirligigs: Design and Construction, book by Andres S Lunde, which is available here on Internet Archive.
The Cameron Art Museum is located in Wilmington, North Carolina. See the Cameron Art Museum website for more information.
The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM), located in Baltimore, Maryland, is the official national museum, education center, and repository for intuitive, self-taught artistry. “Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” See the AVAM website for more information.
Today’s Takeaways
1. Whirligigs can range from simple wind toys to complex kinetic sculptures.
2. Vollis Simpson was “a visionary artist of the junkyard…who made metal scraps into magnificent things that twirled and jangled and clattered when he set them out on his land.” New York Times
3. At their finest, whirligigs “turn the wind into a storyteller”. Jefferson Currie
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