To get to Leigh Ann Cole’s sculptural installation piece, which fulfilled the practice part of her MFA thesis requirements for the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Visual Arts Program, you had to pass through a doorway in a back building of the UCSD Visual Arts Complex. The doorway was guarded by a sign reading: “Never Before Seen.” On the other side of the doorway was a large high-ceiling room, dimly lit, revealing an eerie, darken landscape with an other-worldly ambiance. Although it was fairly dark in the room, you could make out a large object covered with small streams of light. Perhaps it was a large tree; maybe a Monterey cypress bent and twisted by the winds of the Carmel coast. Or maybe it was a large, coiled black snake. Whatever it was, it oozed and twisted from the floor to the ceiling and filled most of the room, and it had a mouth or an opening to its insides. What light there was came from thousands of feet of fiber optic wire which ran like small streams, sometimes bunching up, sometimes running singularly, sometimes dangling like a single firefly-tip hovering in space. They covered the large object and defined it. Two things ran through your mind. Either take a quick look and go, or be brave, slow down and explore. There were those who did both. The brave walked as if in a slow motion trance, paused and examined the large object from many angles and vantage points, much like scientists would a crashed UFO. They climbed over connecting wires to get behind it, dodged fiber optic wires, looked at it from the bottom up and the top down, they even gazed into the gaping black mouth. It was very quiet in the room but the silence had a music to it, although you may have wished for some mood setting space-age music. In the dark, the snake-like object seemed to have a presence — it seemed to be a sentient being — which you could feel in your own body. Chandra Carey, a visual arts Ph.D. art theory student who was on hand for the show, said that means the piece was “embodied.” Viewing the sculpture, you could not help but think of the “The Home Mother Tree” or “The Tree of Souls” in the movie “Avatar” or the alien mother’s cocoon of eggs in the film “Aliens.” Cole calls this “Cinematic Reference,” a fancy term for thinking of a movie you have seen. She said her fiber optic wire lights were also influenced by the light sabers in “Star Wars.” Cole said her overall inspiration for the piece came from what astronomers call a black hole — something that you cannot see, but its effects can be measured, and thus denote its presence. To build the sculpture, Cole used a ton of steel, which she covered in cellophane, then painted black. Over the top of the cellophane she ran 100,000 feet of fiber optic wire. She has been building it in sections for the past two years. There were 28 sections total but she could only fit 22 into the room. It took her three or four days to put it together and she finished painting at the last minute. It cost her between $8,000 and $10,000, which she paid for with her own money, obtained by selling other of her art works. Cole said the properties and characteristics of the materials she used, such as the natural bend in the fiber optic wire, influenced how the piece turned out. On opening night, Cole was an unlikely figure. There she stood in the outside patio area, gaily talking to patrons, while one wondered how this “Heidi” with a cute face, long blonde tussled hair, wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a blue sweat shirt with the rolled up sleeves revealing paint-splattered arms, could have created such a dark, almost monstrous entity, which sat silently, maybe benevolently, but maybe menacingly, in the room next door. Cole said “she shouldn’t have even be here.” She said she doesn’t come from an artistic background and has no genetic proclivity. She was born in Roanoke, Va. Her family made its living by making T-shirts to sell at the circus. But she made it through the undergraduate art program at Virginia Commonwealth University, which is supposed to be the best school for sculpture in America. Now she is completing the program at UCSD and headed to Berlin to study art at Humboldt University, for which she has spent the last two years preparing for by studying German. Cole said Berlin is the new art capital of the world, superseding New York. To see the piece or for further information, visit leighanncole.com or e-mail [email protected].