August 16, 2007
Sculpture with a purpose: UW-made art adorns trail
Five undergraduate students are spending the summer creating sculptures that will serve a useful purpose. Their work will be installed on the interpretive trail at the Willapa Bay Wildlife Refuge near Ilwaco, Wash.
Gary Carpenter, Allison Blevins, Becca Weiss, Kristen Boraca and Jacqye Jones were enrolled in a public art class that spent spring quarter creating designs for a commission by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which runs the Willapa Bay refuge. About 20 designs were submitted to a selection committee that included their teacher, John Young, and representatives from the refuge, and five were chosen.
“The Willapa Bay Interpretive Trail is unique and revolutionary in that it uses sculpture to teach viewers about the species and biodiversity of the refuge, rather than the typical two-dimensional signage,” Young said. “The UW Public Art Program created a set of sculptures when the trail opened in 2003, and was asked back to continue the trail this year.”
Four of the five students are majoring in art, but for most, the summer’s work has been a new experience. Carpenter, an older returning student, has done the most with sculpture in the past. His project is a picnic table and benches, all made out of concrete topped with terrazzo. The table will be in the shape of a dragonfly, one long bench will be a blue worm, while two short ones will be a water bug and a juga snail. Carpenter has spent his time bending and soldering metal frames into which the concrete will be poured. Then, he’ll lay the terrazzo — colored stone, glass and marble chips — on top and grind it down to expose the colors.
“The animals represented are all present in the refuge, and I’m going to get the colors as true to theirs as I can,” he said.
Becca Weiss’ work will literally point the way for visitors to the refuge. She’s creating 12 directional signs that consist of bird figures mounted on poles or perched on existing signs. She cut each bird out of sheet metal and will paint them to resemble common migratory birds that are found at the refuge. The birds’ beaks serve as the directional pointers.
Weiss is in the School of Art’s design program, so she’s more accustomed to doing two-dimensional art. This is her first sculpture; in fact, the public art class was her first studio class. She said working on the sculpture has been an exciting opportunity to learn something new.
Allison Blevins is also engaged in a new experience. She’s a landscape architecture student who said she doesn’t have a lot of shop experience. “Interpretation is something that plays a big role in landscape architecture, so doing this looked like an awesome experience to me,” she said.
Blevins’ piece explains a phenomenon that’s found at the refuge. From a boardwalk over the marshland, visitors can see oil floating on the surface of the water, and they think it’s runoff from the parking lot nearby. But in fact, it’s oils from plants that are breaking down. You can tell the difference, Blevins said, because plant oils break into shards when disturbed, while petroleum swirls.
She’s created bronze shards that represent the plant oils. They’ll be set right into the boardwalk. Ten lines of text explain the phenomenon through a series of clues.
Jacqye Jones is also working with bronze, but she’s building a sculpture that will illustrate the creatures that live in the water.
“My piece is a representation of what happens horizontally in the river, but I’ve depicted it vertically. That’s because the water at the site is murky and you can’t really see the species I’m focusing on,” she said.
Jones is building five structures out of cinderblock covered by mortared stone with the bronze sculptures of creatures like the tailed frog and the western lamprey embedded in them. She too is learning something new, having worked mainly in clay in the past.
Kristen Boraca is the only one of the five students who isn’t building her own sculpture. That’s because her design calls for a steel piece that rises 11 feet, making it too thick and heavy for her to cut and bend herself. Instead, the work has been hired out.
The piece is a spiral with figures of birds mounted on it. Boraca said she saw photos of huge flocks of birds taking off in the area and was inspired by that. “I’m fascinated with the shapes of wings in flight,” she said. “And I was also inspired by Japanese paper cutting.”
The bird figures in her piece are drawn to look like shore birds that frequent the refuge. They will be made of steel covered with black sealant.
The students have been working since early July under the supervision of Young, guest instructor Mike Magrath and graduate student Noah Grusgott They’ll be heading out to the refuge in early September to install their work. A dedication is planned on a date to be announced later.
