Calder's Garden

I had the inspiration for this Public Art Proposal when I went to Atlant to visit my girlfriend 2 weekends ago. While driving around the city, I saw Calder's mobile in front of The High Museum of Art and decided to do something similar but that had to do with the environment.

For this project I decided to do a mobile much like as Calder's. However, instead of having plates in each arm's end, it would have "buckets." Therefore, when it rains, these "buckets" would collect the water from the rain and would irrigate a garden below through small holes inside of them. The structure would be centered in the middle of a circle with 8 meters of diameter and would be 5/6m tall with 2/3 meters arms. The circle would also be delimited with white rocks. In short, the structure would serve as a watering can to the garden. I had this whole water idea because Austin is a very warm and dry city and people are suffering with the lack of water. So after it rains, the buckets would be filled with water and will be able to irrigate the garden for a couple of days. By doing this, the plants will not suffer that much with the heat.

Materials:

The whole structure would be made of steel, including the "buckets," and would all be provided by manufactures. The "buckets" would be hung with steel cable so they stay in place and are not stolen. The garden below the structure would have flowers and plants typical from Austin. Therefore they will not suffer too much with the heat and with the small amount of water.

Location:

Regarding the location, I chose Zilker Park as the site for this work of art because it is a big and open space that receives a lot of people during the spring and summer seasons, which is when this work of art will be more noticed. So the audience for this work would be people running/jogging in the park and people hanging around, relaxing a little bit from the stressfull day of work. I also hope that poeple get some inspiration from this work of art. I hope people will stop and think about their water use and see that water is a scarce resource that we need to save for the future. This work of art will of course be a big structure, however, people may get inspired by it and create some smaller scale structures that they would use in their houses to give the used water another use.



Alex Bueno