House Permutation by Wole Soyinka and multiple artists

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The second of the City of Asylum's "House Publishings".  House Permutaion is also known as Winged House, and includes three separate pieces of art by four different artists that are all interconnected.

Wole Soyinka was the artist in residence here and it is an excerpt from his book The Man Died that's etched into the glass door in his own handwriting.  He is a Nigerian poet and playwright who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986.   The Man Died are notes from the 22 months he spent in prison due to his political activism.  The following is the inscription from the door:

I had newly discovered the world of numbers. Once the first breakthrough was over I began with increasing rapidity to rediscover one mathematical formula after another. Part investigation, part titanic excavation from the murky burial-ground of the labours of long-suffering teachers I tackled one idea after another, testing and re-testing the achieved formula by the most simplistic count-by-count systems. I had TIME! Often I woke up in the morning to a problem and one minute later literally one minute later the guard was tapping on the door to signal lock-up hour. I DESTROYED time. Once I wrote out all the possible combinations of six digits. In the process I uncovered the only way that this could be done to ensure, at a glance, that there was neither duplication nor omission. The result was so obviously a plan for computed aesthetics that I ruled out squares on toilet paper and proceeded to repeat those combinations with colored squares.(Green from leaf juice, black from my ink — christened Soy-ink — and toilet paper white.) The cyclic continuum of the result next made an impression. I joined one end of the toilet paper to the other and asked, Now what have I got? It had a strong resemblance to symbols made by computers. Now how on earth do computers function anyway?

Behind the glass on the door you can just make out a mosaic.

Artists Laura Jean McLaughlin and Bob Ziller (with some help from the Mattress Factory's art lab) created this mosaic to represent the 720 combinations of 6 colors from the passage on the door.

Sculptor Thadius Mosely was commissioned to create the beautiful carved wings on the front of the building.  Spiritual Wings were inspired from Mr Soyinka's passage. Sampsonia Way magazine quoted the artist as saying: I wanted to do something to give the house wings, something with an air of spirituality. When you read the work of these writers, you can see the joy, spirit and idea of personal freedom. I wanted to reflect that.