By Emily Fitzgerald / emily@thurstonchronicle.com
The City of Olympia has unveiled the 15 sculptures to be displayed at Percival Landing this summer as part of the city’s annual Percival Plinth Project.
A public vote through the month of July will determine which sculpture the city purchases for its permanent collection.
The city pays each artist $1,000 to loan their sculpture for a year, with up to $10,000 allocated for the purchase of the winning sculpture.
The winning sculpture takes a coveted spot in front of Olympia City Hall for a year before it’s moved to another location in the community for permanent display.
Last year’s winner was “Crane Study No. 47” by Travis Pond, of Oregon City, Oregon.
A jury selected the 15 sculptures for this year’s display out of 31 applications. Applications were open to permanent residents of Washington or Oregon.
“Each year I talk about how amazed I am at the collection of sculptures,” Olympia City Council Member Clark Gilman said during the council’s March 3 meeting, where the council approved the selected sculptures for display.
Gilman noted that each community member he’s spoken to about the project this year had a different favorite sculpture.
“The people’s choice will come out as folks visit all 15 of these,” Gilman said.
“I already have a few of my favorites that I’m trying to narrow down,” Mayor Pro Tem Yến Huỳnh said, thanking the city’s public art team for their work curating this year’s collection.
“Even on our dreary days, I think they will stand out,” Mayor Dontae Payne said of the selected sculptures.
The selected sculptures are:
- “Bronze in Nature” by Ben Dye of Oregon City, Oregon; made of bronze and corten with elements of copper and stainless steel. “I limit myself to materials that are durable and maintenance free,” Dye writes in an artist statement. “Each sculpture is a means to push myself to see what I am capable of.”
- “Breathe Deep: Raven Moon” by Lauren Lida of Ravensdale; made of a fiberglass nuclear industrial fan blade from Elma’s Satsop Nuclear Power Plant. Part of the ongoing arts initiative “Blades of Change,” this piece aims to mimic the experience of walking through a forest.
- “Enervate” by Hank Nelson/Cloudstone Foundation of Freeland; made of cast bronze. Nelson died in 2022, leaving behind over 550 sculptures at his Whidbey Island sculpture park.
- “Stargate” by Shawn Johnson of Seattle; made of steel and stainless steel. “‘Stargate’ sculpture was created with a modern art vision of our universe,” Johnson writes in an artist statement. “People of all ages have dreamt of the experience of entering outer space through an unknown passageway or a ‘Time Machine’ transporting us to another world or time.”
- “Visionary” by KayC of Bellingham; hand-carved from a blue pine tree trunk with added textile and metal.
- “Love, Peace, just.ICE” by Kannan Krishnan of Seattle; made of powder coated stainless steel. “Constructed with the Ori-hagane method, its interlocking steel elements create an open, shifting form that changes as viewers move around it,” Krishnan writes in an artist statement. “The title plays on the tension between ‘justice’ and ‘just ICE,’ inviting reflection on the gap between our ideals and the lived realities of many. From one angle, the work speaks to universal aspirations-love, peace, justice. From another, it highlights how these ideals can be frozen or fractured.”
- “Playful Sea Otter” by Steven Nagode of Federal Way; made of steel wire with obsidian eyes. “My metal artwork is a unique fusion of my passion for fishing, sea-kayaking, my engineering background in the outdoor industry, and my deep connection to the stunning Salish Sea,” Nagode writes in an artist statement. “I specialize in transforming raw, industrial parts into beautiful and inspiring metal sculptures, giving new life to materials that would otherwise be discarded.”
- “Mobalisk” by Kyle Ocean of Shelton; made of steel. “The piece is designed to be explored and interacted with once you get close enough to engage with it, and blends in well with most environments,” Ocean states. “The piece includes topographical lines on the surface that emulate the terrain of the mountains within the Olympic Range.”
- “The Chimera” by Travis Pond of Oregon City, Oregon; made of repurposed steel. “More than half of what I do is collecting metal materials,” Pond writes in an artist statement. “I look for objects with significance and meaning, objects that have connections to us as individuals and as society as a whole.”
- “Muse” by Chris Rench of Hood River, Oregon; made of stainless and mild steel. “Through each piece, I aim to create art that transcends the visual, that sparks thought, engagement, and a sense of wonder,” Rench states.
- “Liberty Wept” by Chrstine Rose of Portland, Oregon; made of reclaimed metal. “Liberty Wept belongs to that lineage of resistance. It echoes the urgency behind movements insisting that art is not a luxury, but a necessary force when democratic freedoms are at risk,” Rose writes in an artist statement. “Ultimately, Liberty Wept stands as both elegy and call to action: a testament to what we are losing, and a reminder that the fight to protect liberty — and each other — is far from over.”
- “Making Earth” by Karen Sixkiller of Port Angeles; made of steel that will develop a rust patina as it weathers. “‘Making Earth’ depicts the Cherokee story of a water beetle bringing mud up from the ocean floor to create all the solid land we now live on,” Sixkiller states. “The mud he brings is faceted to symbolize its preciousness as the substrate for life.”
- “Speckled Redside Chromie” by James True of Milwaukie, Oregon; made of aluminum, steel, vinyl and clear coat. “Celebrates the wonderful memories in six decades of fly fishing with family, friends and beautiful fish,” True states, noting that the piece rotates in the wind and changes colors in varying light.
- “Bubbles: pessimistic nonspecific units of time” by Ken Turner of Seattle; made of stainless steel. “My sculpture is a static representation of time,” Turner states. “This takes many forms but usually involves implied motion. It could be a figure in motion, a progression, or a 'becoming'. That is, one thing becoming something else.”
- “Silent Words” by Lloyd Whannell of Freeland; made of Idaho travertine and bronze. Part of the artist’s “Silent” series, the sculpture accompanies a poem and is “meant to reflect a sense of silence and serenity,” Whannell states.
