The Vancouver Olympic committee (VANOC) will feature Sechelt Nation artist Dionne Paul's 47 sq. metre stained glass work, The Eyes of the People, at Killarney Community Centre - 2010 Olympics venue for short track speed skating.
"I feel excited about it," Paul said. "I'd applied last year. I was still at work and I was pregnant and the application was very long and convoluted. But I put it in, I forgot about it, I moved, I built a house, I had a baby, I was on maternity leave, and then they called me back and said, 'You've been accepted, please submit a proposal for this venue.'"
Paul, a 2005 grad from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, works in a variety of artistic mediums and styles, including metal, glass, wood, painting and weaving. As part of the VANOC application process, she said she had just one week to put together eight separate proposals for different pieces of art - each tailored to a different venue - and was selected to do the stained glass piece.
The stained glass work, The Eyes of the People, consists of five panels, each measuring 3m by 0.9m.
"It's based on a weaving design," she said. "So the yellow represents the yellow cedar, the amber represents the red cedar and there's an eye motif throughout - a Coast Salish eye.
As for the title, she said, it refers to "the eyes of the people of the competitors, the eyes of the people who will be watching, the eyes of the people of the world coming to look upon the events that are happening here."
Paul said she took some of her inspiration from the venue.
"The whole building [Killarney Community Centre] is done in Mondrian style, which is a very simplistic geographic sort of pattern, so I kept that in mind when I was designing the glass," she said. "I kept the colours very simple so it sort of blended in with the architecture. And the blue glass that's in the design is recycled from the old ice rink at Killarney."
But the sheer size of the project, she said, has been daunting. Prior to completing The Eyes of the People, her largest stained glass measured 30 sq. centimetres.
"In the application it said [the work had to be] 117 inches (3m) by 36 inches (0.9m), so I took out my measuring tape and I was like, 'Oh yeah, that's nine feet-ish. I could do that'," she said. "And then I get to [Killarney Community Centre] and [discover] it's times five, and my jaw hit the ground."
Moreover, she had only six weeks to complete a project, which, she said, would tend to require six months.
And while she said VANOC offered only $12,000 for a work that should cost $55,000, she's looking forward to the Olympic exposure and to being featured in a book coming out in November about First Nations 2010 Olympics artwork.
