Color Falls was a temporary project for the city of Atlanta, Georgia.  They have an annual festival in downtown Atlanta called Elevate, and it’s really about doing temporary installations throughout the city. This was in 2011.

Anyway, they had a call for a temporary piece somewhere in Atlanta.  I’d never been to Atlanta, but it sounded like a really neat project.  It was only for a few weeks. So I just researched online as best I could, trying to find sites in downtown Atlanta.  

I could propose anything, which raises its own issues, like how are you going to get permission to do it there, can you, is it feasible?

But kind of sight unseen, I identified this Woodruff Park, which is a big park in downtown. It’s blocks long.  And there’s a fountain, a wall with water falling over it, and there are some steps below, and this little pool, and it’s probably a full city block.  It’s a very sweeping arc. And so I started looking at that, thinking well, that would be perfect to drape fiber over, this acrylic fiber that I use. To drape it over the wall. And I was inspired by the water, and the vertical lines created by the water, and the motion of the water, but also the fact that the water could hold the fiber to the wall, keep it kind of adhered with surface tension.  That was the thought. I didn’t really know if that was true or not, but it seemed on one hand like it would be true, and on the other hand maybe it wouldn’t!

So I proposed it anyway, and was selected, and it’s thrilling to do this because there’s a certain window of time that I have to install it, right?  And that’s it. And I don’t even know if it’s going to work. And I don’t even know how many materials to buy. And I don’t even know what materials exactly.  What am I going to need to hold this to the wall, and to attach it? I’m trying to understand this fountain and how it’s built, and there’s only so much you can get online, so I’m having people measure it for me, inaccurately, trying to figure out how many spools of fiber and where they’re going to be shipped and where they’re going to be stored downtown once they’re shipped and all this, and how fast is it going to go, and can I actually do this?  So that was my first experience with that kind of installation, where there’s a limited time and you don’t really know what you’re getting into.

Atlanta, color falls, fiber, installation