Giant bird lands on Bainbridge

Published 12:00 pm Saturday, December 17, 2005

The project teaches students ‘sky-sightedness.’

Had a Pileated Woodpecker flown over the soccer field of Hyla Middle School Thursday afternoon, he might have been surprised to look down and see himself.

For 30 minutes, about 110 Hyla students, teachers and parents became the feathers of a giant bird on the school grounds.

The exercise was to teach kids to “see the big picture,” Oregon-based conceptual artist Daniel Dancer said. The Northwestern woodpecker was chosen because it is an indicator species of the environmental health of a forest.

“It’s really important, because things don’t make as much sense from the ground,” Dancer said. “But it’s also seeing things from the point of view of the creature created. The planet is made up of many species, and we need to support all of them to be healthy.”

The project was part of a week-long residency with Dancer, who has been teaching students to “see the big picture” through art for the sky the last five years.

Dancer used mathematic principles to blow up a picture of the woodpecker to a grid of 10×10-foot squares on the field.

He focused on “sky-sightedness” as seeing the big picture, collaboration between students, and expressing gratitude to the sky or “the great mystery.”

The project’s impermanence, Dancer said, suggests that “our life will be taken, so we have to embrace the temporariness of everything.”

He developed the ideas from his work as photographer in the early 1980s for crop artist Stan Herd who created images 20 acres in size using crops and a tractor.

“I became fascinated with the idea of giving thanks to the sky,” Dancer said.

From that, the other ideas flowed, and the presentations were embraced at Hyla School.

“Art is about ideas. To me, art is successful when it makes you look at things a little differently,” art teacher Laura Jones said. “People dismiss the painting that is just a dot in the middle as ‘I could do that,’ but the important part is the idea that led up to that.”

Down on the field on the chilly day the bird was assembled and photographed, the general consensus was that it was cold.

But, said seventh-grader Chris Walker, “I thought it was really cool. I’ve been artistic, but I’ve never actually been art.”