Orca Sculpture at School in Silverdale, Washington

Founded in Oakland in 1997, Wowhaus is the artist duo of Scott Constable and Ene Osteraas-Constable. We make site-specific/site-responsive, community-engaged public art in cities across the USA. We work in a wide range of media and contexts, so our work takes many forms, but is best known for being highly crafted, interactive, environmentally astute, conceptually rigorous, and fantastically innovative in form.

We were recently commissioned by the Washington State Arts Commission to realize a project at a new public middle school complex in Silverdale, WA. We were invited by the school to choose a site within the new complex and its and propose and create a new site-specific artwork. Wanting to meaningfully impact the daily experience of teachers, staff and students, and also complement the beautiful architecture for the community, we decided to create a suspended sculpture within the main entry commons. The sculpture would daily greet people as they entered the building, but would also be visible from outside the school for the greater community who frequent the campus, which doubles as a neighborhood park.

I designed and made our ORCA sculpture as a tribute to the killer whale, or orca dolphin, a globally endangered species and apex predator, and a familiar sight in the waterways surrounding Kitsap. I also wanted to honor the forests and craft traditions of the region, so I designed and built the ORCA sculpture like a traditional wooden boat, using local Western red cedar, white ash from Oregon, and Sitka spruce from further up the coast. I steam bent the ash ribs, and riveted stringers of sitka spruce to make the basic form. I hand-shaped fins and flippers from Western red cedar, and laminated them to a cold bent spine of the same tightly grained wood, from which the ribs and stringers hang. I wanted the sculpture to mimic an encounter in nature, but also wanted it to evoke the historic technologies and craft traditions of the region. Also, as we formalized our proposal, we conceived of the dropped ceiling in the space as analogous to the surface of the sea from below. Our ORCA sculpture encourages students and staff to think of architectural spaces metaphorically, and in scale with their natural surroundings.

–Scott Constable