Hendricks Hall has a new role this year as the campus’s welcoming center for prospective students. The new space also has a new, usable piece of art: a miniature golf hole designed by Mark Dixon and Tom Dawson. The installation aims not only to improve the admissions experience but also to embrace Uniquely Guilford by promoting an interactive experience with Dixon’s latest contraption.

Dixon, a 1996 graduate of Guilford, is an Art professor and serves as Chair of the Art Department and the Experience Design Program. He has created many pieces around Guilford, such as “Question For The Library” in Hege.

Dixon says the mini-golf set was designed to be playful.

“My work is about finding patterns and breaking them,” said Dixon. “The pattern is an imaginative response, and the way we recreate that pattern is a way that adds variation, surprise, or mystery to it. And that plays out in this hole, I think. Some real ace could just pop it right into the hole, but they don’t get any of the joyride up here.”

For incoming students, Mini Golf Hole 7 serves as a reminder that Guilford is not only a place to learn, but also a place to have fun and find meaning through experience.

Dawson Edwards, a former student of Dixon’s and a Presidential Fellow for the Office of Admissions, said the game is complex and unpredictable.

“Everyone is enjoying the golf course, being able to use it, being able to play, bringing lots of smiles and fun to our admission space,” Edwards said. 

Dixon’s design incorporates elements of art, physics, and math, in a creative, hands-on approach. The golf set’s unique features include a launching mechanism, a firing chamber in which the ball drops, and a marimba-like sound chamber.

Dixon describes the design process as complex, requiring numerous prototypes.

The launcher was a creative challenge that was added to the golf set to give just enough force to launch the ball, but also to make the contraption stable in order to avoid what Dixon phrased as “pushing the boundaries of what the launcher was supposed to do.”

Another challenge in the building process was designing the marimba chamber. Once the ball is launched, it falls into the chamber, bouncing from key to key, which are actually pieces of tuning wood. Each piece has a different pitch, each one being angled to bounce onto the other. Dixon added a pivot and lever in case the ball missed each note, ensuring a musical sound would play  as the ball fell into the artificial grass.

Dixon said the course was built using scavenged materials, including a bike wheel, welded tubes, a traffic sign, and some screen door hinges.

Dixon said the project required about 120 hours of work, but was exhilarating.

“It was a joy for me. I love making things,” he said. 

Dixon originally built the set for a fundraiser for the Center for Visual Arts, an ongoing gallery that has shown a lot of Dixon’s work as well as his students’. In 2019, the center invited Dixon and other artists to design and build one putt-putt hole.

Dixon and the other artists’ holes made up a mini-golf course for kids and families to pay to play through for a couple of months, making it a big success.

The golf hole was added to Hendricks to make the space “a more imaginative place,” said Dixon.

Lydia Saunders, an admissions counselor at Guilford, believes the hole has been well-received by the community. 

“I think the mini golf set can certainly be a tradition to welcome students,” said Saunders. “I think the Admissions space in general is something that will continue to evolve as times change, and having tangible items displaying the collaborative nature of our education will show how we are truly one of a kind.”