Snake Path

Project: Stuart Collection Installation

Project Location: University of California San Diego campus

Client: Alexis Smith

Commission: Illustration of for project proposal, designed the head of the snake

“Alexis Smith's work for the Stuart Collection, Snake Path, consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to the Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around a small "garden of Eden" with several fruit trees including an apple, a fig and a pomegranate. There is a marble bench with a quote from Thomas Gray: "Yet ah why should they know their fate/When sorrow never comes too late/And happiness too swiftly flies/Thought would destroy their Paradise/No more, where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise." The path then passes a monumental granite book carved with a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost.  "And wilt thou not be loathe to leave this Paradise, but shalt possess a Paradise within thee, happier far.’”

(https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/smith-a.html)