Stream Echo

Description: Stream Echo is a large-scale relief that weaves through a viewing plaza, echoing the underground passage of the creek in the culvert below. It includes a simulated stream, text describing the relationship between salmon and humans, and sculpted images of salmon. To blend the local community’s values with his artwork, Mr. Jay encouraged school children and community members to bring small stones and submit text that articulate the importance of informed stewardship, to incorporate into his sculpture. This reverie of images and words celebrates the biodiversity of urban streams and their regional roles as both habitat and classroom. 

Artist Statement: My work is about finding my way home. It is inherently and intensely bioregional; it focuses on the life forms, the nature “persons” of the NW Biome and the stories the indigenous peoples have evolved around and about this place. The aim of my work is to “re-story” the landscape, to make the human community aware that it is part of a vivid neighborhood, a gathering of myriad lives, interdependent, alive by the gracious gifts of sun, green plants, water, and air.  In my understanding and imagination this re-storying process is most coherently embodied in the salmon, the totem of North Pacific watersheds. My work of the last twenty years has been a meditation on Salmon and an attempt to re-present its wisdom to the alienated human community who has deluded itself into “knowing” that commerce is the Fundament.

Location: Fauntleroy Creek, Fauntleroy Way Southwest, across from the Fauntleroy Ferry Terminal, Seattle WA  98136