Home Sweet Tacoma Light trail
This piece came to be as a fun intersection of my two favorite art events that I participated in— Wayzgoose and the McKinley Hill public art training cohort. Shortly after our final public art training cohort session we were emailed the link to apply for Tacoma Light Trail’s public art call. I had previously seen the call but I didn’t have any ideas for light art and I wasn’t a light artist, nor had I ever made any light-based artwork so I brushed it off as something that wasn’t a priority. But the email, fresh on the heels of a public art training that had me feeling really pumped for making public art, I decided to noodle a little more intently on a light art concept. I knew this Wayzgoose piece had been a pretty big hit, so instead of reinventing the wheel, I decided to reimagine it as light art. As a printmaker I love how printing requires you to think about layers and how many colors you’re going to print and in what order you’re going to print them. So this piece is essentially breaking a print apart into its layers, and then using light to illuminate it all from behind. I love how this piece shifts as you walk past and your perspective changes and the layers eventually align perfectly.
The black layers of the original Home Sweet Tacoma print I had printed on acrylic plexi from a sign shop, then I got two blank sheets of plexi for the color layers. I tried a few methods of doing the color, starting with acrylic paint, which wasn’t translucent enough and produced too much brushstroke texture, and alcohol ink which was too transparent and not bold enough. Eventually I decided on colored tissue paper applied with Mod Podge, and I love how it actually looks pretty similar to how relief printed ink looks on paper. Everything is illuminated from behind with 100ft of LED strip lights. Designing and executing this piece stretched my creative brain in new and fun ways and it’s always a pleasure to have my art out and about in Tacoma!
The Tacoma Light Trail art pieces will be all over Tacoma for the duration of January, and there are some great live events that are part of the Light Trail as well, so head over to their website to check out the map of light art as well as dates for events!
