A drab, grey retaining wall in an industrial part of town has become the canvas for one of Chilliwack’s newest completed pieces of public art.
The 345-foot long concrete lock block wall outside LSC Pre-Cast Systems Ltd. – at the corner of Lickman and Chilliwack Mountain roads – has been beautified with a bright green mural featuring fernlike swirls and three-dimensional circular shapes.
You can almost see the curled up fronds come to life and unfurl before your eyes as the 3D “spores” float across the wall.
“We left it totally open to murals or three-dimensional things, and when this proposal came, it was so excellent because it covers everything,” Sylvie Roussel-Janssens, president of LSC said.
She and her company put the call out for artists in May 2019, offering $5,000 to the chosen artist.
READ MORE: Artist proposals sought to beautify retaining wall in Chilliwack
Tracie Stewart of Abbotsford was picked. She work on the mural, on and off, for about five months. The piece was finished in December and is a combination of painting and cast concrete elements.
“It’s like spores, or bursts of atoms, or music notes,” Stewart said of the concrete half-spheres sprinkled throughout her piece.
Stewart’s work at LSC was kind of like an artist-in-residence project as she chatted with employees about how it would be constructed and how they could lend a hand.
Glen Lapierre, senior concrete technician, helped her with some of the casting. There are one or two metal bolts attached to each of the hundreds of 3D concrete half-spheres. Holes were drilled into the lock blocks and then the bolts were epoxied into the wall.
The mural is located at the trailhead of a not-so-well-known walkway called Lickman Ponds Trail, close to lots of greenery, animals and insects. When Stewart was painting, small salamanders would scurry out from the gaps between the lock blocks and bask in the sun near her.
“It was really neat. I’d be painting this curl and a salamander would come out and do a curl right below it,” she said.
Stewart describes the mural as “a celebration of life” and “the resilience of nature bursting out of the seams.”
The green energy radiating from the mural is like “heart energy shining through,” the artist said. She wants people to feel that energy when they walk past her work.
While Stewart was working on it, people walking along the trail expressed how happy they were with the mural and how pleased they were that a local business was doing something nice for the community.
“The whole point of this is to give an example of how relatively easy and inexpensive it can be for public art,” Roussel-Janssens said.
Because of the low height of the wall and since scaffolding was not needed to construct the mural, there were no safety issues. That also kept costs down because LSC didn’t have to rent equipment.
Stewart is also a registered horticulturalist. She designed and planted new landscaping in the corner of the property that borders the wall. The chosen plants and design mirror some of the mural elements with colour and shape.
“You keep seeing this really negative dialogue [about the cost of public art]… but there are many ways to do small projects either with private businesses doing it on their own, or a collaboration with the city,” Roussel-Janssens said.
The mural at LSC was done by the company itself – it was not funded by the city.
Roussel-Janssens hopes the business community takes note of this attempt to link community space and private space in a visual way.
“Public art does not have to be complicated and expensive,” Roussel-Janssens said, adding the more public art a city has, the better.
“I say sprinkle that stuff everywhere. [Start] small and watch it grow, just like these spores.”
Get local stories you won’t find anywhere else right to your inbox. Sign up here
Artist Tracie Stewart (left) and president of LSC Pre-Cast Systems Sylvie Roussel-Janssens stand beside the green mural located at the north end of Lickman Road. (Jenna Hauck/ The Progress)
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
