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King County Public Art Plan / Bramble (2023-ongoing)
In 2022, I began working with 4Culture (King County’s Arts and Culture organization) and the King County Parks system. King County is the County in the Pacific Northwest that holds Seattle (and 38 other cities). It’s a bit of a homecoming for me - the first project I’ve done in my home town (er, county!).
The planning process involved dozens of stakeholders, several sovereign nations, scores of local artists and culture bearers and many hours spent traveling across the vast domain of King County’s park system. It made sense, given this vastness, to design the plan in a way that does little to specify art types or locations, but seeks to create procedures, relationships, and suggest ways of working.
The plan is organized around the central metaphor of gardening - tending to the soil, scattering seeds, supporting the right plants in the right places, and planning for decomposition and endless change. It also gets into some detail about aligning the budgeting and planning process of two distinct government agencies and ways to design (and measure) equity and inclusion through budgeting. You can read the whole thing here.
The final component of the planning process is the creation of a public artwork in line with the plan’s vision. The site selected for this work is a 20-acre plot of land in the process of becoming an urban park.
The primary site condition of the land at present is the thorough infestation of himalayan blackberry -a registered noxious weed in King County. Secondarily, native berries like Salalberry and Osoberry are thriving in small pockets of this land - an area near the location of historically rich blueberry fields and a fertile lake bed known by the muckleshoot to have harbored whales. This project will seek to bring these two populations of berries into relationship. The himalayan blackberry, initially brought to the northwest by Luther Burbank, the “plant wizard” of California which will require constant tending and weeding. The native berries: osoberry, serviceberry, huckleberry, salmonberry which will over time be nurtured through a relationship with tribes, students at the next-door middle school, and the County.
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