Twisting In The Wind.

A familiar object to visitors to The Dean Gallery, George Rickey's 1977 sculpture Two Lines up Excentric VI has long fascinated me, ever since I first saw it in the grounds of The Gallery of Modern Art, the artwork's original home.

George Rickey was born in Indiana but spent his childhood in Glasgow. He was fascinated by the machinery and atmosphere of the ships on the Clyde and considered becoming an engineer, eventually doing so when he joined the United States Army in 1942.

He had studied History at Oxford and studied painting in Paris before the war, returning to it after his Army discharge and continuing his education in New York and Chicago. In the 1950s Rickey began to move away from painting and began to experiment with kinetic sculpture, influenced by the works of David Smith and Alexander Calder.

As with much of his postwar sculptures, Two Lines up Excentric VI is driven by the wind, deigned so that the two arms can pivot around and have complete 360-degree motion - yet it is designed so that the arms never touch, and the effect is both balletic and hypnotic to watch, depending on the weather. This was possible because of his wartime experience; in designing gun turrets for bombers, he was aware that practical necessity induces design ingenuity - in his case with lightweight metal alloys, balancing weights and ball bearings.

Rickey died at home in Minnesota in 2002m at the age of 95.