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
By Deborah R. Meyer
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.