Today Dolf and I met with Cabeth Cornelius and Cinda Sherman to review plans for Main Street Park. I wasn’t planning to say anything about Message in a Bottle, but I let it out of the bag. There was a lot of excitement about what the project could do, not only as an art piece but as a way for the community to do something together downtown. There is a unanimous feeling in Jacksonville about the military. We are a military town, and we are proud of it. So it’s time for me to give this some serious consideration, and prepare myself to run with this project.
Anytime we come up with a wild idea we look for confirmation. I wrote up a description so I could pass it around to some close friends. One of my inspirations for recognizing the military is Scott Keffer, a Navy Chief, currently overseas in Italy. He guided me through our other project in 2007-08 called Photographers for Freedom, when Keffer was deployed to Iraq.
I created a description of the project (MessageInABottle PDF) and started thinking about the logistical details. I started feeling nervous when I started calculating what it would take to build a wall in the park. The main planter is 210 ft long by 18 ft wide. A water bottle is 2.5″ x 8″. Thinking that I would stack the bottles like firewood, it would take approximately 30,000 bottles to build a wall 210 ft long x 6 ft high. If we wanted to collect enough bottles to represent every serviceman/woman engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan (200,000), the wall would have 6-7 layers of 30,000 bottles. That’s a big wall and a LOT of bottles.
The logistics of collection, processing, recording, and preparing the bottles for the park is a daunting task. And what of the construction itself? How will the wall be supported, how will the construction be staged, how will the bottles be attached to each other, what kind of lighting would be required?
I wanted to know if the idea had enough merit to warrant further study. Sometime we fall in love with our own ideas, and this one needed some confirmation before I was going to jump in. The initial reaction from people was good, although most quickly realized what a difficult task lay ahead of us, especially if we wanted something in place before the holidays.
Main Street Park is a public park located behind our library and art museum. It usually is a place for the homeless to hang out, and very rarely do we see anyone using the space for anything. During our recent Jazz Festival the park was full and it was clear that the space could be utilized for the enjoyment of the public if there was something interesting there to see. I’ve been working with Dolf James and his Art in Strange Places project for the past year, and he envisioned placing several “pop-up galleries” in the park with contributions from local artists. I volunteered to produce a piece, and we opened the park to the public for August Art Walk to a big crowd of enthusiastic supporters. After the pop-ups we installed my Blu Gras piece in the park which got me to thinking about what was next. The park is a wonderfully designed open space with linear planters and a plaza. It is a perfect venue for installation sculptures and events.
I’ve been recently inspired by artists such as Andy Goldsworth and Maya Lin, whose large scale artworks are able to engage their viewers and present alternate views of common materials. I envisioned a large scale installation in the park, and arrived at using recycled water bottles as a material that was readily and cheaply available, was structural, lightweight, and waterproof, and had properties of translucency. I was excited to do something with this material. My original communication with Dolf about an idea to collect bottles with messages was on 9/10.
The next day I watched the memorials on 9/11. I was inspired to do something that would bring awareness to those who serve our country and thought that the message could be directed to our troops. I knew that this would bring an element of community involvement to the project, and could ultimately be something that could lift the spirits of our troops for the holidays.
