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What I'm doing right now is laying out these flower pattern tiles that are going to wrap around all of the fins.
And I cut them according to how smooth the cement is.
I was trying to do it by measurement and it would be off because these things aren't the same.
You know, it's wider here and it's flatter there.
This project started out actually from the community of Maywood.
They for years had been wanting to do a tribute park to Benito Juarez.
So that became the jumping off point for me when they wanted me to design something for the kids at the jungle gym
that wasn't going to be one of those prefab, plastic, metal kinds of things.
The Trust for Public Land, which hired me for this, saw my work at the Alhambra Library.
I had done the entry to the children's room there.
Community involvement is a big part of every one of these projects because that's what it's about, is the community.
And so I thought, you know, Benito Juarez being from Oaxaca, I would make the play structures be like Oaxacan carved creatures,
which are just about fantasy and some of them are about spiritual imagery.
And I thought it'd be a great way to kind of bring that in a way that the kids could appreciate it and then learn a little about it.
And that's what I was excited about, was doing something that really was artful
and unique to that community.
No, I definitely do not do it all myself.
All the little objects, all the little bits of words, all the little things are maybe my story in some way because I like this against this and this against that.
You know, ten people will look at it and ten different people will have ten different stories because they will relate to it in a different way,
whether it's a salt and pepper shaker or the cap of something or a metal or piece of jewelry or whatever it is.
And that's what I love to make it dense with imagery that other people can create stories regardless of what story I've thought of.
So there's lots of changes that came into this from the original concept based on safety and based on how the expert said that we needed to manipulate the kids so that they would be safe and still have fun.
Here is the orange tiger.
This one is the dragon slide.
This one is meant for them to come to the end of this and then jump off of here and then they can head toward the rest of the park.
And here is the sea monster which is going to have misters in its nose so that when during the summer you'll hit a little button on the floor it's going to start shooting water out of its nose.
This is one of my favorite.
I discovered this material called dichroic glass that jewelers glass workers use and I found a company that actually puts the dichroic glass on ceramic tile and it just made these beautiful eyeballs that I just love.
When you do work for public and it's within an area that people can actually get at, I've got to sand the edges of every piece so there's no sharp edges.
Because there's going to be a lot of work once we get into the park, we've got to put all the pieces together, we've got to put tile where all the edges met, all the grouting.
This really has been a very, very special project for me, for my wish to bring art to children.
When people see this and use this, I really, really hope that it can help lead children, not to necessarily be artists, but to just be more artful.
It's going to be Maywood Park and Maywood is next to the city of Bell and Commerce, it's southeast of downtown, maybe about five miles or so.
People are starting to rediscover the mosaics that have been done in California.
They've been made cultural landmarks so they can't be touched.
Watchtowers, which is what got me started, just volunteering, gluing pieces back and that's how I learned number one about the concept of mosaic and also the style of using scrap tile and of doing abstract.
It's actually going to create an atmosphere of this creature and the frogs being in like a lagoon.
There's a section of this where you can actually walk through it and the rubber flooring is going to go all the way through that so it looks like the water is going into the belly of it.
Because the whole thing is to create stories with the art and also just to be creative that things are possible and that somebody cares about this community enough to create this for them.
It's going to be Maywood Park.
It's going to be Maywood Park.
Thank you.
