Artists’ work for Climate Pledge Arena to focus on light, movement and energy

SEATTLE — Iole Alessandrini loves to work with light: both natural and artificial, so it’s no surprise she had plenty to demonstrate from her West Seattle studio.

She told KIRO 7, “Our visual perception is conditioned by the space in which we live.”

She showed us amazing previous work, like the Laser Plane project she did in collaboration with optical engineer and astronomer, Ed Mannery.

For the Climate Pledge ”Art at the Arena,” she will bring her love of light to life, again!

“I feel that I have developed a relationship with this medium that allows me to take it and play with it,” Alessandrini said.

And that, she does! Alessandrini’s Climate Pledge Arena exhibition will sit on the Southeast corner of the plaza.

Inspired by the mythological creature, the raven, she is creating an interactive piece titled, “The Raven and the Light.” It will be “staged” on a 14 x 14 foot basalt square with lights that will map the trajectory of the Raven constellation.

“The raven is the trickster that is also the life knowledge giver in some of these mythological stores,” she said. You will “not only get to see the constellation of the raven, but all the other constellations and the planets.”

I also met Seattle Artist Norie Sato this month who is working on a piece for Climate Pledge Arena, and she, too, is inspired by light, movement and energy and her love of science!

Talking to us from her art studio, Sato told me, “there is a similarity in the way that scientists sometimes depict what is out there in the galaxies and what’s tiny, tiny, tiny, and this kind of relationship between energy and energy movement and strength is all kind of tied up in the work that I developed.”

Sato is working on a mosaic that will be about 18 feet by 18 feet. Look for it on one end of the “event stack” at Climate Pledge and you’ll see that love of science, right there. It includes magnetic forces, galaxy images of sorts and the idea of things coming out of the darkness.

This idea was sent to a studio in Germany and that is where huge pieces of mouth-blown glass are being flattened and cut to interpret Sato’s vision into a colorful mosaic. Each piece, she tells me, is very important; and a metaphor for society.

“Individually, we each have our personality, but then we kind of become a whole and create our own dynamic as a group,” Sato said.

Sato’s vision will come to life when the mosaics arrive to Seattle in October. She will be there as artisans from Europe install the work and make it whole.

For both Sato and Alessandrini, they can’t wait to see it all take shape.

“I am designing a piece that can be there a very, very long time and I am very happy. I am very happy,” Alessandrini said.

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