Artist's glass creation will make stroll on bridge a walk in the clouds

During the day, it will alter the views of downtown as people walk above the waterfront railroad tracks just south of Myrtle Edwards Park. At night, its bright colors will be lighted and visible from downtown skyscrapers and the waterfront.

"Seattle Cloud Cover," a 212-foot-long art installation in Olympic Sculpture Park, will be completed by this fall, in time for the opening of the new park. Its design is by Teresita Fernandez, a 38-year-old New York artist whose accolades include a coveted "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

Fernandez's piece will be a 9-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide L-shaped piece of glass on the edge of a pedestrian bridge over the railroad lines that cut through the park, she said Sunday during a lecture at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

The lecture is the first of several by artists who will have works in the park, said Renee Devine, the art-program manager for Olympic Sculpture Park.

The sculpture park is part of a $180 million capital campaign that includes expansion of the downtown Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and improvements to the Asian Art Museum on Capitol Hill. Ground was broken in June on the 8.5-acre park. The land was purchased in 1999 for $16.5 million from Union Oil of California.

This will be Fernandez's first permanent public art installation and her first piece in Seattle. Her work has appeared in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among other places.

Within the piece of glass, there will be a translucent, brightly colored image created from pictures of clouds but altered and colorized using computer software, Fernandez said.

The image also will have small holes to create a cinematic effect as park patrons walk along a gravel path over the bridge.

The piece will alter the views of downtown from the bridge, but the view of Puget Sound from the other side of the bridge will remain open, Devine said.

"Seattle Cloud Cover" also will serve a practical purpose, because park designers were required to put something over the bridge to keep people from throwing things onto, or jumping onto, the railroad tracks below, Devine said.

The piece will be an artistic alternative to a large chain-link fence on that side of the bridge, she said. A smaller fence will protect the other side of the bridge.

Fernandez was selected about two years ago by Lisa Corrin, the artistic lead for the Olympic Sculpture Park, to do the piece.

Corrin said she met Fernandez when the New York artist was fresh out of graduate school and immediately recognized her talent. She said Fernandez's work is a good fit for Seattle because it makes viewers reflect on their perceptions of nature.

"She distills the nature," Corrin said, and through that her work becomes "the effect that nature has on our senses."

In Fernandez' other work, she has represented fire by using layers of dyed silk thread, represented sand dunes using aluminum steps and glass beads, and represented a rainbow using tens of thousands of colored acrylic cubes.

Fernandez said she also is interested in giving viewers a role by allowing them to set the work into motion.

In the Seattle sculpture, the thousands of tiny, transparent holes in the image will cause the view through the glass to change as someone walks along the bridge, Devine said.

Compared to creating studio pieces, it has been a different experience creating a permanent piece of public art, Fernandez said.

"I know what it's like to go to a park — you don't want to go and have to think about art," Fernandez said.

"You don't have to know about art to get it."

Brian Alexander: 425-745-7845 or balexander@seattletimes.com