No, the sculpture near Taylor Dock atop a pile of tin slag is not coming back. She’s now in “permanent hospice,” creator Alex McLean said.
Known as “Grace,” McLean said in a lengthy and humorous email that he removed the decaying sculpture during the low tides this weekend. He never intended for it to be permanent. “Grace” was made from thin, rust-prone, mild steel.
“She wasn’t aging well and, even though I, personally, enjoyed the entropy and symbolism of the experiment — we’re quite obviously in some stage of imperial collapse and decay as a nation, after all — I had a duty to either not let it go ‘too far’ or to not put City employees in a dangerous or dumb bind of ‘having to’ take her down themselves,” McLean said.
McLean first erected the sculpture in 2011 without permits from the city. The steel sculpture of a woman doing yoga was perched on top of a pile of rusted tin in Bellingham Bay. (She also made an appearance at Burning Man.) “Grace” was in place for about a year, until the artist removed it, according to a Bellingham Herald story. In 2021, “Grace” reappeared on top of the pile — McLean said multiple elected officials at the time had “nudged” him to reinstall the piece.
After another three years exposed to the harsh elements, the sculpture is now unrepairable, McLean said, “but still charming enough that I will bother to clean the seagull shit off of her and pluck the bird nests out of her ass.”
McLean said “Grace” was the “single most adored” piece of public art in Bellingham’s history.
“People wrote songs and poetry about that sculpture, they made paintings of her, they took thousands of (occasionally excellent!) photos and, in many cases, they created an economic multiplier by selling the best of their own artistic responses to this public sculpture,” he wrote.
McLean said “Grace” may have a “brief sabbatical” at a local yoga studio while he works on a commission piece for them, but that she won’t have any “lengthy return” to public settings.
After all, McLean said, if photos of “Grace” are to be featured in Google searches of Bellingham, “then it behooves both the City and my civic responsibility to not have that iconic thing disintegrating and ablating rusty chunks of herself into the sea.”
Charlotte Alden is CDN’s general assignment/enterprise reporter; reach her at charlottealden@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 123.
