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  • From: "Steve Wright" <swright AT townofchapelhill.org>
  • To: <chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Chpac-staff] SCP article from last week
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:56:10 -0500

Dear CHPAC,

 

In writing up the minutes from last week’s meeting, I realize I never sent the link to Debbie Meyer’s story on the Southern Community Park art features from the January 9 Chapel Hill News.  Here it is, linked and reproduced below.

 

-Steve

 

http://www.chapelhillnews.com/weekend/story/12006.html

 

 

Art is woven into new park's design
Brush Strokes

 

A few years ago, while a Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission committee was working to select a proposal from among the many submissions for artwork at the new Southern Community Park, the group decided to go au naturel.

It was an excellent choice, and when the 72-acre park opens near Southern Village this spring, the applause should be deafening. All of the works of art are being created almost entirely with natural materials from the park's site -- stone, earth, wood and water.

The artists, Tom Haddad and Laura Drugan, are a husband-and-wife team from Seattle that specializes in creating art installations in outdoor spaces. They spent a lot of time on the park site, developing not only an intimate relationship with the topography but also with the gifts it revealed.

"We found artifacts scattered throughout the woods, like old bottles and an old piece of ingrown barbed wire in wood," Drugan said. These discoveries added a mysterious layer to the couple's explorations and led them to believe there had once been buildings there.

"We started to look on old maps to see any historical structures that were there," Drugan said.

They found none, but in searching the maps they discovered an old local iron mine that once operated there. They also saw the nearby burial plots for the Purefoy family in Southern Village and knew these were elements they wanted their art installations to speak of, even if at a whisper.

One of the pieces that relies heavily on dirt is a nod to the iron mine. Another piece, which incorporates a wooden ladder onto a growing tree and colored shards of Plexiglas in the surrounding tree canopies, uses boulders from the site to point to nearby historic sites -- New Hope Chapel and Mount Carmel Church.

The landscape around the pieces will change with the seasons, explained Haddad, casting each piece in a new pattern of light and shade. The pieces themselves will change, as well --some, such as the Plexiglass, once with the seasons, and others over longer periods of years. Two pieces called "the pine datum" and "the oak datum," for example, are created of short, thick pieces of wood taken from the site; over time the wood will decompose and eventually return to the earth.

About $27,950, or a little over half of the total budget for these artistic elements, was provided by the town of Chapel Hill's Percent for Art Ordinance, which went into effect in March 2002. (See www.chapelhillarts.org/programs_percent_ov.php).

The Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission administers the program. Eric Davis is the Percent for Art committee chair and a member of the Public Arts Commission. He said it is important that public art be endorsed as an valuable asset. The artwork, he said, helps create a fabric for a healthy environment along with the other features that make up the new park -- trails, soccer fields and so on.

"I also think it is important that there are not distinct zones, that the art isn't just stuck in an art zone but it is woven throughout the ransect of the park," Davis said.

Steve Wright, the public art coordinator for the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission, is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the art project. He and I walked the site recently, and despite the stinging cold and chilling rain, it was clear to me that our lives will be enhanced by having access to the park. There will be a lot of joyous shrieking, and perhaps a lot of stolen kisses, through the seasons and the years.

Brian Starkey of obs Landscape Architects in Raleigh is the landscape architect for the park. He said that collaborating with Haddad and Drugan on the art installations has been very successful.

"It was an affirmation that art can be woven into a public space and done so in a way that is in keeping with the project as a public space," Starkey said.

According to Bill Webster, assistant director of the Parks and Recreation Department, the site will include a dog park, a youth baseball field, an open meadow area, three full-size soccer fields, an inline hockey court, a couple of basketball courts, two picnic shelters, trails, bathroom facilities, bike racks, and benches.

Webster has worked closely with the artists and has enjoyed the creative process and helping to make the ideas come alive.

"We have provided input along with everybody else," he said. "There are lots of ideas out there. I think in some cases we were the voice of fiscal reason and shared concerns about vandalism, not wanting things to disappear."

Drugan and Haddad formed a creative relationship with Bynum artist Luke Barrow, who owns Rustic Garden Structures. Barrow will build the wooden ladder mentioned earlier.

"I think the best thing is that Tom and Laura immediately reached out to the local artistic community for input on the different structures, features, and installations," Barrow said. "It was very important to them to have the community have a lot of involvement. It will be our park and it would have been easy to take a corporate stance on the development and not have a community signature."

Few things are more symbolic of a community than its children. Haddad and Drugan invited Gina Conyers, the full-time art teacher at Mary Scroggs Elementary School in Southern Village, to have students create birdhouses for the park. Thirty-eight students divided into teams of four have been brainstorming, sketching, and creating to prepare for their part in creating the park. Gourds are being used for the structures.

"I was just really amazed at how creative some of their ideas were," Conyers said. "We are putting clay elements on the gourds as clay is such an important part of Carolina. We still add sticks and twigs too from the site."

Wildflowers and meadow grasses are also a part of the art installation, used in ways that I imagine will provide inspiration to adventurous neighborhood gardeners. As Eric Davis said when we talked, "You can stand in the art."

For years to come, the art in Southern Community Park will help us stand taller as we revel in and share our addition to the Southern Part of Heaven.

 



  • [Chpac-staff] SCP article from last week, Steve Wright, 01/17/2008

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