Maya Lin (Submitted photo by Cheung Ching Ming)

Maya Lin pauses in the middle of a phone interview at her summer home in Colorado. Her daughters, ages 8 and 9, are going on a family trip to a local cave to play with crystals and clay. "Bye -- have fuuuuuuunnn!!" she calls out to the sound of a door slamming shut.

Then she sighs into the phone. Mom is not going.

"I gotta work today."

At an age, 47, when many artists are just coming into their own, Lin has been a superstar in the art world for more than half her life. After having her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial selected in 1981 while an undergrad at Yale University, she has gone on to create several other major memorials, while building an eclectic career that straddles the line between art and architecture.

She juggles commissions all over the country -- earlier this week she was making flight arrangements to travel to the West Coast to check on one project before returning to her studio in New York. There she will finalize the model of her latest work, a sculpture that will be installed in October at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Titled "Above and Below," it will use aluminum tubing to re-create the contours of a 100-foot underground section of White River. Lin spent months working with scientists who used sonarlike technology to map the geologic wonder. The final product, which will span the second and third floors of the IMA, reflects a central theme in her work: using technology to look at natural terrain in a new way.

"I've always connected myself back to the 18th- and 19th-century landscape painters. They were seeing the land through the means they were capable of seeing with, which was through the eye," Lin said. "We've got sonar view or an aerial view or a microscope view. We have very different tools with technology to take a different view of landscape."

Her IMA sculpture will render the underground riverbed and caves in a grid pattern, similar to the way a computer would visualize them.

"I see the wire landscape as almost drawings in space. And then we're lighting them in ways so that the shadows that cast on the side walls of the balcony as well as the floors will begin to play off an idea of this three-dimensional object in space, but it also becomes in its shadow a two-dimensional line drawing."

After she signs off on the model early next week, it will be sent to a foundry in Walla Walla, Wash., for fabrication. The installation process will also include a new stone floor for the Fortune Balcony, where the top part of the sculpture will rise up in front of the third-floor windows.

Lin said this is not unusual for her -- to get called in for an art project, only to have a little architectural work tossed in. Her career, particularly early on, confused people as to her specialty.

"It took me about 10 years of seriously making art before people would almost recognize the art, because everyone was really intrigued by the (Vietnam) memorial."

Lin has striven to keep her artwork distinct from her architectural designs, seeing the latter as a "functional art form" while the former should "not be about any exterior function." But the one area where they combine is the work for which she's most famous: the memorials.

In addition to the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., Lin has designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., and The Women's Table, a commemoration of the coeducation of women at Yale University. She is working on a memorial to native tribes encountered in Washington state by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

She's also just begun work on a new memorial for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on environmentalism, one of Lin's passions. She described it as a multiplatform memorial that "will exist in many places -- a book, a Web site and video pieces."

Academy officials confirmed the project, which is set to debut in October 2008, though they haven't announced it yet.

Lin revealed that this project, to be titled "Missing," will be her final memorial.

"The memorials, each one has been about history in some respect -- and, I would say, very politically charged contemporary issues," she said. "I've never wanted to be typecast as the 'maker of memorials.' So I've been very careful of what (projects) I've taken on. So I feel like it would be a good time to close it down after the environmental one."

Maya Lin

Occupation: Sculptor, architect. Owner of Maya Lin Studio in New York City.

Personal: 47 years old, married to Daniel Wolf; two children.

Birthplace: Athens, Ohio.

Education: B.A. (1981), M.A. in architecture (1986), D.F.A. (1987), Yale University.

Notable works: Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. (dedicated in 1982); Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, Ala. (1989); Langston Hughes Library, Clinton, Tenn. (1999).

Film: Subject of a feature-length film, "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision," which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1995.

Book: Author of "Boundaries" (Simon & Schuster), published in 2000.

About Lin's sculpture for the IMA

What: Artist Maya Lin designed a 2,000-square-foot sculpture called "Above and Below" for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Description: Lin's design uses aluminum tubing to create a sculptural sketch of the underground portions of Indiana's White River system.

Where: "Above and Below" will sit on the IMA's Fortune Balcony, which overlooks the museum's outdoor amphitheater, and will serve as a gateway work for the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, scheduled to open in 2009.

Cost: The sculpture was funded through a gift from William L. and Jane H. Fortune. Museum officials declined to disclose the cost.

Information: Visit www.ima-art.org.

--Christopher Lloyd / Indianapolis Star