Last year was the first year that a group of Innisfil artists came together as the Innisfil Sculpture Group, to participate in International Sculpture Day – a global celebration of sculpture in public places, designed to raise aware and appreciation of the arts.
Sculptures by local artists Jeanette Luchese, Christina Luck, Tim Laurin, Gail Esau, Mary Cellucci and Denis Bolohan popped up in “unlikely” places around town, from the offices of InnPower, the local utility company, to Innisfil Council Chambers.
This year, plans are to install sculpture in even more “uncommon” places around Innisfil, linking the #ISDAY celebration to the 200th Anniversary of the Town of Innisfil.
International Sculpture Day takes place on April 25, 2020, but the first sculpture has already been installed in Innisfil, at the Town Hall.
“Railway Spikes,” by local sculptor Gail Esau, is a pile of over-sized concrete spikes. The work was first created for the City of Barrie’s Urban Visions ’07, to mark the reinstatement of train service by GO Transit, between Barrie and Union Station in Toronto.
Esau, who works out of her studio in Churchill, has exhibited at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto, and various other group shows and exhibits. She described the work as an expression of the technology that connects people, and the “foundations of transportation that ignited the urban development of Simcoe County.”
The revisited installation at Innisfil Town Hall represents the next stage in building those links between people, and between the past and the future – a reference to the planned GO Train station on Innisfil’s Line 6, and the proposed futuristic ORBIT community.
Watch for other sculptural works to be installed all around Innisfil – including artwork by students at Nantyr Shores Secondary School.
