Prairie Roots was commissioned by the City of Marshall.  That was a great project. There have been a lot of great projects, from the perspective of fun and adventure.  That was one of them. 

There have been also a lot of projects that end up being installed right in the wrong time of the year, when it starts to really get cold.  I don’t know how that happens, but it’s happened quite a few times.  And that was one of the all-time record cold installs.  I mean, I couldn’t turn the car off.  It gets a lot colder out there, and the car had to stay on or it wouldn’t start again. We’re talking about below zero temperatures.  It was harrowing.  

What made it fun?  I’ll tell you, one of the greatest things about the project was, first of all, it was challenging to figure out how to take these blades of grass and make them stand.  Some of them are about 17 feet tall.  So how do you do that?  Hundreds of them.  Each one has its own concrete footing, but they’re each individual.  So there’s a piece of metal that’s cast into that concrete footing.  And then the sculptural pole fits over that piece, and it’s bolted to that.  And that was a really complicated thing to come up with.  It had to be economical, it had to be feasible, and if it sounds like a lot of work to augur 300 holes out that are very close to each other–it was.  Because how are you going to do that?  They have to be located somehow.  So I went around with little flags and put a certain number in and so that they knew where to dig.  And it had to be done in a way that they could pour the concrete and work kind of from the center outward.

So that was fun, that was a real good challenge.

Marshall, prairie roots, public art