Women Who Weld create public artworks for Washougal

WASHOUGAL — To hear Shirley Scott tell it, this town’s recent drive toward proliferating public artworks was born out of good old-fashioned municipal jealousy.

Scott, a Washougal Parks Board commissioner, was visiting Stevenson, out in the Columbia River Gorge, where she fell completely in love with a colorful, kinetic, riverside creation called “Galaxy” by Seattle sculptor Andrew Carson. “Galaxy” is a whimsically whirling, wind-driven assembly of metal, glass, gears and wheels that twists and spins in the breeze in a stunningly complex and fun fashion.

Scott was fascinated, she said, but also irritated: “Why can’t we have one of those in Washougal?”

She got her wish, more or less, although going from notion to completion took 11 years. That’s how long ago Scott first pitched the idea of adding art to Washougal’s public parks. The parks board liked the idea, but one city council member shot down spending any city dollars on art, Scott said.

Suzanne Grover, parks and cemeteries manager, suggested a less-expensive alternative: instead of commissioning Carson, why not turn to the locally famous Women Who Weld to enrich Washougal’s local arts scene — and, as it turned out, get four artworks for the price of one?

That’s what happened. The Women Who Weld pitched an affordable plan to create public artworks of the four elements. Scott and others raised private funds and stashed them with the Parks Foundation of Clark County. (This effort preceded the informal discussions and meetings that eventually became the Washougal Arts and Culture Alliance, which has not been a driver of this project, Grover and Scott said.) Scott personally sponsored the first of four installations.

That’s “Earth,” a symbolic stack of basalt columns tipped with crayonlike colors, paddles that wheel in the wind and, on top, glassy shapes flying out like molten rocks erupting from a volcano. “Earth” and the rest of the elements were originally going to be set atop the tall pilings at Steamboat Landing, but after a flood occurred there that would have damaged or even destroyed the artworks, the plan was changed.

The elements now occupy various local sites that correspond to their themes, Grover said — for example, “Earth” was installed in 2013 alongside the pedestrian underpass that leads from downtown Washougal to Steamboat Landing Park and the waterfront trail. Pedestrians admire “Earth” when they’re just about to take an underground journey.

“Earth” was created by Vancouver metal artist Sharon Warman Agnor. She’s one of those Women Who Weld, a group of artists who embarked on welding classes together at Clark College in 2000, and generated such exciting sparks that they started getting local commissions — like the celebrated “Wendy the Welder” (aka Wendy Rose) statue now monitoring the Vancouver waterfront near the defunct shipyards, where the labors of an earlier generation of welding women helped win World War II.

That waterfront statue is where Wendy Armstrong, another one of the contemporary Women Who Weld, occasionally stops on a stroll to eavesdrop people’s diverse comments about “Wendy the Welder,” she laughed. That’s one of the joys of art, Grover agreed: all the individual interpretations and inspirations.

Public art “beautifies our city and it adds interest to the street,” Scott said. “It gets people talking.”

More public art is planned for Washougal, including a mural by Toma Villa on the exterior of the public library that honors Washougal founder Betsey Ough, aka Princess White Wing.

Where the well was

After “Earth” in 2013, the next element in Washougal’s Women Who Weld series was “Wind,” by Kathy Willson, in 2015. It’s a wispy collection of wire gusts carrying aloft many things that belong in the sky (kites, butterflies, clouds) and a few that don’t, in “Wizard of Oz” fashion (a windblown house, a flying cow). “Wind” is on display at Beaver Park, which has a “things with wings” educational theme, and you can sit and peruse the artwork from the comfort of another Women Who Weld creation, a “butterfly bench” by Jennifer Corio.

Corio and her husband, Dave Frei, of Cobalt Designworks in Vancouver, created the third element in the Washougal series, installed at Steamboat Landing in 2016: “Fire,” a super-tall riverboat smokestack and an artistic echo of the primeval volcanic activity that formed our local landscape — all in tribute to Mayor Molly Coston’s late husband, Phil Harris, executive director of the Two Rivers Heritage Museum. Coston sponsored the piece.

The final element, Armstrong’s “Water,” was unveiled Dec. 1. It’s a glittering assemblage of stainless-steel bubbles, wind-catching ladles, lightning strikes and, prominent above all that, one humongous fish. The whole thing towers over a supremely historic spot, Grover said: the northeast corner of Main and Pendleton Way, a few feet from where Washougal’s original, communal town well was located (now the middle of the street, Grover said).

In fact, all four of the elements by Women Who Weld are perched up on tall metal pipes. Armstrong said a main challenge of this project was understanding what her planned artwork would look like when viewed from below. “It’s hard to build something up in the air,” Armstrong said. “You really don’t know what it’s going to look like — but it looks cooler than I thought it would. Especially when it moves.”

Armstrong, whose day job involves being another kind of artist — a barber — said her affinity for welding surprised her, because she’d always enjoyed more fine-fingered metal work, like making jewelry. “I like little stuff,” she said. “But this turned out to be so cool. Cool tools and you heat things up and make sparks!”