Under Construction! 

Opening November 2025. 

Invitation

Countless meaningful stories will unfold at the Cloverdale Sport and Ice Complex. People will find challenge, achievement, and camaraderie, moving through hope, defeat, and victory. Beneath each story lies the ice.

The ice extends an open invitation, with limits that each individual engages as they will. Their movements, enabled by the ice, express their own stories. These stories change and evolve, while the ice endures as a basis for personal and cultural meaning. Its endurance lies in its openness, its invitation. The plaza artwork has an opportunity to honor and extend this invitation, suggesting possibilities while remaining open to interpretation.

Action

The Cloverdale Sport and Ice Complex is a place of action. The physical dynamism of bodies moving through space with incredible agility extends from the ice, its form and substance. The ice is a flat plane, smooth and almost formless, yet resilient and responsive—yielding for speed and resisting for acceleration. Through people pressing strength and skill into skates, this plane blooms into arcs and whorls that rise, dive, dance, and clash with explosive energy. These fleeting expressions suggest a palette of forms: sweeping curves, bent planes, overlapping movements frozen in time. The dynamic tension between the ice’s flatness and the energetic volume of its use is a fertile source for sculptural form.

Pause 

The plaza is a liminal space between the intense activity within the Complex and the daily lives beyond. It’s a space between sport and everything else, where an invitation to pause amid activity is a generous gift. The plaza artwork can invite busy people to pause between activities, to breathe, to notice the present moment, and be taken up into an aesthetic experience. This contrast between activity and pause is at the heart of the artwork.

Stillness

Within the action of the Complex, brief yet powerful moments of stillness arise: the apex of a triple lutz, a hockey stick at maximum withdrawal, the zamboni driver alone when lights are low. These vanishing moments illuminate the speed, grace, and fervor of the action through contrast.

Contrast is how experiences become intelligible and meaningful. Our lives are filled with activity, each foregrounding the previous. When activity is constant, contrast diminishes and the significance of each activity diminishes with it. Stillness is necessary to make sense of our busyness, to appreciate its meaning and purpose, yet we often struggle to find it.

Sculpture has the potential to create contrast through implied motion, stirring the feeling of movement in its utter stillness. This is an illusion that captures and rewards attention and can be achieved through curvature, layering, and imbalanced visual weight with no direct reference to the human form.

The individual pieces of the proposed artwork are titled Stillness 1 & 2. Their name draws attention to the physical stasis of the object in contrast to their designed visual evocation of motion. Calling attention to the illusion cannot fully dispel it. Rather, it invites the audience to momentarily stand aside from the implication and notice what is actually there. This contrast serves to put the illusion in relief, heightening its significance.

Then Return To Ground

For the Cloverdale Sport and Ice Complex, we propose two iterations of Stillness, forming a site-specific composition subtitled Then Return To Ground. This meditates on the relative stasis at the apex of an aerial maneuver—an instantaneous pause before descent. The complete installation title is Stillness, Then Return To Ground.

This fragmentary phrase seeds a question “After what?”—an unspoken narrative completed by the audience. It may be read as an imperative, or  permission: “Yes, you may fly and then…” It implies another layer of contrast: What is the relationship between “stillness” and “ground”? What is unsaid? Such tensions remain unresolved.

Stillness, Then Return To Ground is an open invitation, drawing context from viewers’ stories and allowing anyone to find relevance and meaning.

Process

Stillness is the latest example of our lineage of work, Material Operations, wherein precise manipulations draw form, space, and structure out of materials.

Cutting and bending produce Stillness. Starting with a flat square, two intersecting folds terminate before crossing, joining through a cut arc. This cut “bends the fold” forcing the material to transition from a planar to a vaulted surface. The form emerges as a gradient of the material’s elasticity resolving these counter-biases.

The design is therefore partly found in the nature of the material. Surface curvature is drawn out from the material’s elasticity, revealed through process. Like athletic movements on ice, Stillness is an elaboration of a flat plane realized by addressing material limits with skillful action. 

Pairing

The elegance of these objects stems partly from their self-overlay, creating visual depth that changes with perspective. Simply rotating them yields distinct forms, an economy of variation lending itself to combination. Multiple rotated and clustered iterations of Stillness create numerous shifting layers, each piece foregrounded by its companions. Light and shadow interplay on contoured surfaces, generating contrast. 

Pairing also suggests a social relationship between forms. In the context of the Cloverdale Sport and Ice Complex, they may evoke the charged moment before a faceoff, or ice dancers amplifying one another’s momentum. Each reinforces and elevates the other and the overall presence of the artwork.

Situation

We propose installing Stillness, Then Return To Ground in the Northwest corner of the raised landscape. This location provides adequate space for both building and sculpture, with the large blank wall serving as a muted backdrop framing the installation. 

Right Fit is essential to the success of this project. It is therefore necessary that the work be large enough to hold presence in the context of the building and the car park. We therefore suggest making space for the artwork by moving one of the two larger trees to the Southeastern raised landscape. Paired in this way, the trees will combine to create more shade for the walkway. As a pair of pairs, the sculpture and the trees reinforce the bifurcation of the landscape design and lend dynamic tension to the overall composition, again, by contrast.