There’s art in action on the Saint John waterfront.
For the next month or so, eight seasoned artists will put their skills on display as part of Sculpture Saint John. An estimated 35,000 people will have the opportunity to see what goes into sculpting granite into art.
This is the fourth symposium in Saint John, and each year the completed pieces are delivered to various communities in the region. The eight artists were selected from 175 applicants from 50 countries.
Phil Savage from the Kingston Penninsula says he’s thrilled to have been selected.
“Not only am I doing work that I love to do, I know that all this labour is going to result in a permanent piece that will literally be here for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Savage says.
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Executive director Diana Alexander says allowing the public to see the process is important.
“Often times a piece of art arrives in your community and nobody really know the background behind it,” Alexander says. “They don’t know the artist, it just appears, with this the communities are very involved and that piece of public art that appears in their community, they know it’s been created for them.”
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David Baldwin is a retired art teacher from Yarmouth, and is a site volunteer.
“I was here in 2014, noticed it and came over for a few days,” he says. “I couldn’t leave the site, my wife did some shopping and I came back, I had to come back, I couldn’t leave it.”
Funding for the project comes from a variety of sources, including corporate and government contributions.
Sculpture Saint John wraps up Sept. 22