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- By MIKE YOUDS
Daily News Staff Reporter
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- A stone's throw from the rising waters of the Thompson River
in Riverside
Park, sculptor Bill Vazan stands before a pile of river stone
trucked in
from Penticton.
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- Vazan is going to have a blast here over the next three months.
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- More precisely, the Montreal sculptor will be sandblasting
and grinding
away to create a permanent legacy of public art. He is the first
to arrive
of four internationally recognized sculptors who will make up
the Kamloops
component of the Okanagan Thompson International Sculpture Symposium.
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- Running through the summer from May to August, the symposium
will have 20
sculptors - 10 from Canada and 10 from abroad - create 20 major
pieces of
sculpture in nine sponsoring communities including Kamloops.
Each community
has been able to select its sculptors. Non-commissioned sculptors
will be
working through the symposium as well.
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- Vazan's work will consist of three tiers of granite (the
larger stones will
be delivered to the site next week) that will stand four metres
high on a
knoll at the western end of the park above the Rivers Trail.
Into the
granite he will etch an abstract design featuring rectilinear
and
curvilinear lines, a theme common to other sculptures he has
created.
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- "It's a simple concept but the thing is, it's done with
a technique that
has a lot of visual grab," he says of the work he has planned.
"People love
it."
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- An artist for more than 40 years, Vazan's work has often
reflected his
belief that nature and humanity are profoundly linked. He has
investigated
the human-cosmos relationship in his land art, sculpture, painting
and
photography. His commissioned works around the world include
a 30-tonne
piece created for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
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- Two of his more prominent works include a sculpture behind
the National
Gallery of Canada, on Nepean Point overlooking the Ottawa River,
and
another at the Musee du Quebec in Quebec City.
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- "Those are smaller and single stones, so this is going
to be more
meaningful than those two," he says.
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- Vazan has been staying with Kamloops artist Tricia Sellmer
and her family
while getting settled here. He will be joined on Sunday by British
sculptor
Giles Kent, who works with wood.
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- Sculptor Geert Mass of Kelowna will join them prior to the
opening of the
symposium here on June 6, but the involvement of a fourth sculptor,
Percy
Zorilla Soto of Peru, is in jeopardy. Soto's visitor's visa hearing
won't
take place until June 7. The visa application of another symposium
sculptor, a non-commissioned Chinese artist, has already been
rejected.
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- Sellmer, a symposium volunteer, remains hopeful that a fourth
commissioned
sculptor will be available for Kamloops.
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- Kamloops' share of the symposium has take on a grass-roots
component, with
much of the background work donated by local firms such as Robo
Transport,
Sterling Crane, Warner Rentals, Paul Creek Slicing and Sher Holdings
Ltd.
Weyerhaeser has chipped in as well to support the symposium's
opening
celebration. The opening starts at 6:30 p.m. at Sport Mart Place.
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- "We've made huge progress," she says of the Vazan
work. "The rocks are
arriving as we speak."
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