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& Dumay Gorham’s
McNaughton Photography by Allison Potter
artists, architects and art patrons: for
Margie Worthington’s Carolina Heights
backyard he fabricated a life-sized cow;
for Ligon and Susan Flynn’s courtyard
he created a larger-than-life-sized
Galapagos tortoise; and for Michael and
Susan Glancy he created a gigantic snail.
And who has not seen the giraffe he
created with students from the DREAMS
Center for Arts Education now installed
at Greenfield Lake Park, or his shim-mering
fish installations at the North
Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher?
Back at Acme, Van Hout moves fast,
talks faster. As he creaks open the door
to his studio, he says, “This is the Ali
Baba entrance.” Like the fictional char-acter,
this master of his craft is busy at
work, cutting and collecting wood when
fortune finds him amid the array of
rusted metal sheets and planks of wood
leaning against the building.
Inside his studio the interior is
warmed by table lamps, furnished
roughly with a pair of work tables, a
pair of distressed wooden chairs, a few
stools and a cabinet. He burns the
Dumay Gorham’s sea serpent rises
from the New Hanover County
Arboretum’s landscaped water feature.