We are flying high to announce that the new large scale site installation Flying Fish by Amsterdam’s public sculpture artist Daniella Rubinovitz is now soaring through the trees of the Sculpture Forest for you to experience. Daniella has created an aerial sculpture with visual references to our local famous marine life such as salmon, orca, and more. They are formed at a that is scale sized up to match our century old trees like our area’s salmon and other marine life would be proportionally sized to an underwater forest of kelp or eel grass beds.

“I used to dream of flying as if I were swimming.” There was something evolutionary that made sense to Daniella, from fish to bird. ‘Swimming’ transformed into ‘flying’. Fish now swim through the trees in this underwater forest.

Combining air and water create ever changing illusions. Flying Fish first appears as a large three-dimensional piece as you approach from a distance. As you walk underneath, it disappears into a line. The surface reflects and distorts the surroundings. The optical play from volume to line mimic these transformative qualities of air in water.

Flying Fish was first created as a full-scale charcoal sketch at Daniella’s studio in Amsterdam. It was then digitized and fine tuned in order to be fabricated and laser cut locally from large aluminum panels. These panels were treated and clear powder coated, and then shipped by truck. The sculpture was installed onsite by the team of local community volunteers.

After months of advance preparation, planning, and logistics, the onsite installation took four consecutive 10 hour days with up to 11 volunteers onsite. The installation was co-led every day by Scott, Ken Price, and Bob Davenport, with a full crew on raising and positioning day that also included Karen Price, Lydia Price, Greg Neal (sculptor of Soaring Eagle and Attacking Eagle), Rose Neal, Wendy Wasik, Nic Wasik, Steffan Soule, and Sky Lewis. We were even able to occasionally converse and coordinate with Daniella onsite via video calls from 9 time zones away.

Thank you to Daniella for creating this new sculpture to experience in the Sculpture Forest, and thank you to the volunteer leads and crew who worked hard to get it installed for the community to enjoy.