Shimmering

In his 100-year-old remodeled barn southeast of Spokane, artist Ken Spiering is creating a piece of public artwork that soon will change the city’s landscape.

With help from his assistant, Austin Stiegemeier, and his daughter, Annie, Spiering is enameling 2,400 3 ½-inch metal disks with blues, greens and violets to resemble the shimmering scales of a fish. Four eyelets are pounded into each disk and they’re laced, by hand, into four, 20-foot-long, five-foot-high steel fish frames.

Once mounted, the fish will appear to dance through waves outside Spokane’s new Convention Center. The artwork will be mounted along 770 feet of the wall where Division Street flows west into Spokane Falls Boulevard.

This will be one of the first views convention-goers in Spokane have of the new Group Health Exhibit Hall at the city’s Convention Center expansion. The grand opening is planned for July 19, but Spiering’s artwork will not be installed until the fall. The artwork has been more than two years in the making, from the time Spiering first started sketching designs in December 2003.

To create the fish scales, the artists are tapping some 10,000 eyelets into the disks by hand. The disks are then sanded, oiled and dusted with enamel powder. After they melt the enamel on with a torch, the artists cool and stack them, according to color, until they can be wired into place on the fish frames.

“You want to come up with a batch of colors that sequence very nicely from one to the other,” Spiering said. “I’m excited about how it’s coming out. It’s every bit as colorful as the initial visual concept I had.”

Next, stainless steel plates will be cut into long, curving arrowheads that will appear to guide the fish, and viewers, toward the Convention Center’s entrance.

Though the work can be tedious, Spiering doesn’t lose sight of the piece’s eventual importance to the community. It will welcome visitors into the new Convention Center and reflect the river’s importance to the city.

As with his giant Radio Flyer wagon in Riverfront Park, Spiering analyzed this artwork repeatedly to make sure any message it would send would not offend.

“What kind of message are you bringing to the community with a piece?” Spiering said he asks himself while creating his art. “It will become, hopefully, a signature and a piece of the identity of the community.”

On June 6, the artists will fit the fish forms to the wall to determine how they’ll have to weld the brackets that will hold them. That work will necessitate the closure of a traffic lane around the Convention Center. The fish shapes then will be removed and go back to the shop off the Palouse Highway to be completed.

And as the new public artwork will change the landscape of Spokane, working with Spiering already has been a life-changing experience for Stiegemeier, 20. The Rathdrum native was a student of Spiering’s at North Idaho College when he was hired as an assistant. On Spiering’s recommendation, Stiegemeier, a painter, plans to move on to Western Washington University to finish his bachelor’s degree in studio art.

“He’s been a good mentor for me,” Stiegemeier said. “I’m sure it’s going to be a lifelong friendship.”