Ingrid Koivukangas
Environmental Artist

Responding to sites around the world through works created in site specific installation, intervention, ephemeral sculpture, video, sound, web, permanent site-specific sculpture, photography, printmaking,painting & drawing.

Welcoming opportunities to work in different geographic regions & locations in the world, creating site-specific works in response to the land.

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Elemental Directions
Proposal prepared for
Niagara College Glendale Campus 2002

Introduction to the proposal:
Elemental Directions is a series of four site specific works to be found on the Glendale Campus on the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario. The works are made as a multi-layered response to the College, the building, the Niagara Escarpment and to the land itself.

The site works integrate and take into account the architect's original design and use of building materials as well as the environmental studies and horticulture programs taught at this campus. While at the same time honouring the fact that the College borders the Niagara Escarpment – a UNESCO world biosphere reserve.

Elemental Directions integrates the architect's use of the circle motif, found throughout the campus. The circle is an ancient and universal symbol of unity and wholeness, and to earth-centered religions represents the sacred Mother Earth. The spiral, which is linked to the circle, is found in one of the site pieces and represents continual change and the evolution of the universe.

Elemental Directions is set in a circle around the main campus building with a site specific piece found in each of the four directions. When the sites are joined, the work becomes a quartered circle, representing the four primary directions and the four spirits: air, fire, earth and water.

Each site piece is also linked to the element associated with its direction and at the same time responding to the land and site itself. Both through the use of materials as well as through the opportunity presented to the viewer for interaction with the actual physical site as well as far beyond the site, both visually as well as spiritually.

Earth Pod to the West invites the viewer to sink into the earth, to be encompassed by her, while looking outward to the life that she supports.

Polaris Viewing Station to the North invites
the viewer to look at our world and to the stars and heavens beyond this earth,
from a different perspective.

To the East, Sun Spiral, asks the viewer to journey to the top of a stone spiral to watch the fire of the sun illuminate the distant horizon.

While the South holds Arborvitae, Tree of Life, planted as an act of faith in humanity and the Earth itself. Providing a place for the viewer to sit under sheltering branches, to contemplate how they fit within the circle.

©Ingrid Koivukangas 2002