Tower Window
Paper clay, Portland Cement, water sealant, rope, u-bolts, wood
8’ x 3’ x 3’ sculpture installed on 15’ flagpole
STNDRD
Granite City, IL
2026

Tower Window is a drawing-in-space of the electric tower that can be seen from STNDRD.

In a region often characterized by its flatness, steel towers assert their strange geometries toward the clouds. Electric lines string across the sky. This infrastructure creates vertical interest on the Midwest horizon and, like the STNDRD flagpole, invites the upward glance.

Carmen Ribaudo is interested in pushing the material conditions of drawing from life. Line is the building block of drawing. For Tower Window, the line drawing method is paper clay sculpture. The lines trace through space and are framing devices for the surrounding landscape.

In the translation from the tower’s line configurations to the sculptural reconstruction, the machined geometry of the original tower becomes warped and asymmetrical. Its material softens as it moves from steel to colored paper clay. The sculptural flag is not a rendering, but a re-interpretation through the artist’s hand.

“You cannot help but think of lines and the contours they trace when you think of this region …The vertical line when it arranges itself into something like the silver water tower floating over a town breaks the monotony and the power of horizon. These ordinary structures become monument...we look for anything, a fence post or a person standing up in the high prairie grass, that will lead the eye up from the flat earth to the paralleling flat sky.”

– Michael Martone, The Flatness and Other Landscapes