Ten years ago, Spokane artist Ildiko Kalapacs was thinking about women who live in and around war zones.
“I saw a picture of an Afghan woman who was stoned out of her mind in a hut and crouching down by a wall," Kalapacs said. "So many people self medicate because they have no access to health and they’re suffering and they’re hungry and they have PTSD and all that,” she said.
So Kalapacs decided to sculpt a piece that would get people thinking. Working in bronze, she began to craft the figure of a woman.
“She has no clothes on, no cultural references. She’s also kind of dispossessed. She doesn’t have much baggage and she’s carrying a food basket on top of her head," she said. "A young soldier, also nude, totally vulnerable, sitting in the basket with a huge machine gun on the top of his feet, legs and with a cigar. And she’s walking on a muddy road, carrying him and all of the burdens of war, the heavy weight of war. It’s very European, very bittersweet.”
And somewhat controversial. It’s a sculpture about war after all. You can see a model of it at TheBearingProject.com.
“When you first look at the piece, the first thing that grabs you is usually the soldier and the gun and the cigar and that’s where we got a lot of input from different people we were looking for funding from," said Patricia Kienholz, president of The Bearing Public Sculpture Project.
Some people didn’t like the gun, she said. Others didn’t like that he was smoking a cigar.
Kienholz and Kalapacs and the project’s board members had been pursuing a place in which to mount a life-sized version of the model. They looked to businesses, universities and other private venues. Kienholz says they finally decided a public park was the best place.
“The people who need it the most are the people who are least able to pay for it. So that’s why a public park is the perfect place for it. They don’t have to pay to go see it,” she said.
Now they have their venue. In 2016, the Spokane city Park Board granted them permission to permanently install it in Sunset Park. That’s near the bluff along the Centennial Trail on the western edge of Kendall Yards.
With the site now determined, the project is in fundraising mode. Kienholz says the organization hopes to raise about $75,000 this year to convert a two-foot high model into something much larger. And then they need to raise another $50,000 to pay for the permanent installation.
Ildiko Kalapacs says the goal of her sculpture is to get people to think.
“I don’t want to take sides politically. My role is to start a conversation about what’s happening to refugees, what’s happening to soldiers,” she said.
And that’s the interesting part of art. Everyone who sees it has a different interpretation. Patricia Kienholz says her view about the sculpture has evolved.
“I really see it as a road to recovery. And when I look at the soldier, I see someone who is wounded and I see a woman who is bearing that burden of that impact from his experience," Kienholz said.
"To me, what’s so important about art is that it is a way to provide interpretations and to create dialogues to open peoples’ minds to alternate ways to look at something and to see something in new ways to approach things and towards healing. And how do we get that message out to everyone?" she said. "This piece does that and it opens up the door for both progressives and conservatives like myself and everyone in between and kind of erases the political aspect and gets us down to the humanitarian level where we all have this stuff in common and everybody wants to help and we all feel helpless trying to help these people.”
The goal is to have The Bearing Project up for viewing sometime in 2019. You can view the sculpture at TheBearingProject.com.