Comma, 1996
Steel and ferro-concrete stucco
120" x 78" x 78" (H x W x D)

Comma is the oldest and most widely exhibited of Lee Badger's public art sculptures. It was acquired by the City of Sandy Springs, GA for permanent installation in Marsh Creek Rain Garden Park in August of 2022. Over the previous 16 years it was exhibited in nine different rotating public art exhibitions.

Comma is kinetic and meant to be touched and rotated, allowing viewers to interact with curving shapes and shadows. The disk-like spiral form rotates on a cylindrical base evoking both rotary motion and spiral progression.

Comma is rich with familiar associations. Spheres on the spiral tips suggest heavenly bodies in the swirling universe. Other viewers find aquatic or nautical allusions and see the spiral disk as a rolling wave or a rotating sail. Celestial or nautical, Comma’s materials keep it grounded in earthly reality. The spiral disk is rusted steel, and the stained stucco base suggests an old industrial stanchion or a wharf mooring, reminiscent of obsolete machinery and the mechanical past.

Sculptors, art critics and connoisseurs appreciate Comma as a study of curvature in line, plane, shape, volume and dynamic space.