Shot during a visit to his studio in 2006. Sorry about the video quality and sound. He had a radio blasting in the background.
Vollis Simpson was born in 1919. Simpson’s first whirligig was built to power a washing machine while he was stationed on Saipan in the Marianas Islands in the Second World War. After the war, he designed and built heavy equipment for moving houses and opened a repair shop in a rural crossroads community in eastern North Carolina. Simpson continued to be interested in wind power and built several other large windmills, one of which powered a heating system in his house. After starting his house-moving operation in 1985, Simpson adapted his own workshop and began using heavy equipment to make gigantic whirligigs and wind machines on one corner of his brother’s farm. His largest pieces are nearly forty feet tall and weigh thousands of pounds, four of which were installed in downtown Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic games. Covered with highway reflectors, they are at least as spectacular at night as during the day.
Vollis Simpson never calls himself an artist, but the thousands of people who have visited his astounding whirligig field in Wilson County, North Carolina, certainly do. Towering fifty feet or more above ground, and extending nearly as far outwards into space, the more than thirty monumental whirligigs erected in his field demonstrate the power of individual vision coupled with a traditional art form. These compelling, nationally recognized assemblages have found their way from a crossroads in rural North Carolina to international art collections and even into a popular window installation at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, testifying to their wide-ranging appeal and their abiding influence on his peers as well as younger generations of artists and engineers. Now they have found a home in the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in Historic Downtown Wilson, where they will delight visitors young and old from far and wide.
After a lifetime repairing machinery and moving houses, Simpson found himself at age 65 with spare time and many, many spare parts. Rather than “sit around and watch TV,” Simpson eyed his collection, remembered a windmill he constructed during World War II, and began to build. Using some of the same rigs he’d developed for moving houses, Simpson began constructing enormous windmills in his yard. They did not resemble the working windmills of grinding or irrigation use, but referenced the concepts of weather vanes and handcrafted whirligigs that are still seen locally on houses, fence posts and barns. Simpson’s windmills embody folklorist Henry Glassie’s observation of a common folk artists’ practice of miniaturizing or “super-sizing” objects drawn from their workaday lives. Vollis Simpson is taken with the gargantuan.
