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Description: Four 4 by 8-feet steel panels show
images from the night desert sky. One screen, two panels painted
purple, shows yucca moths pollinating yucca plants in the moonlight.
The other screen, painted orange, shows night blooming cereus cacti.
The granite cubes designed for seating space have sandblasted quotes
about the desert by authors from 1904 to 2001. Images of ancient
pottery and other desert botanical influenced images are sandblasted
into the granite. Nearby, the artist asked that mesquite trees for
shade and desert verbena ground cover be added.
Tempe’s goal with its Artist Designed Transit Shelters is to
encourage people to use the public transportation by making it
attractive, innovative and functional.
Funding:
The project was funded through city of Tempe Capital Improvement
Project Percent for Art funds made available through the Tempe
Transit Tax.
Artist biography:
Linda Haworth was born in Patagonia, and
raised just north in Tucson. She studied art at the University of
Arizona and later received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in
Ceramics from Northern Arizona University in 1982. She has worked
full time in public art, clay, pottery and sculpture for 28 years.
Linda Haworth has completed four public art installations in Tucson
and two bus stops in Tempe. Linda lives and works in Hillsboro, Ore.
She has completed two light rail stations for the city of
Portland. She installed cast glass sculpture for a Seattle Public
Library and the city of Hillsboro's Civic Center.
Artist statement:
Linda worked with the community to determine people’s desires for a
successful transit shelter.
She focused on increasing the shade with angles of the roof, screens
cut out with desert botanical imagery (which gives incredible shadow
art that shifts with the angle of the sun) and additions of closer,
lower and more human scale mesquite trees.
She artfully incorporated the concept of shade with desert imagery
featuring botanical subject matter such as night blooming cereus,
horned toad lizards and yucca moths. |
