Campbell Library Art Display

"With mapping comes wandering, and through walks, conversations, books, and papers I came to an explorer’s understanding of the town of Campbell and its place in the Santa Clara Valley. I drew maps of thought, emotion, and memory to interpret and record my findings. They tell a graphic tale of a place, suggesting travel notes from a journey. However, in this mapped version of Campbell, ‘arrival’ at a certain place is intentionally delayed. Diversions happen. Exploration follows intuition, like browsing a library collection and stumbling onto unexpected connections.

"Dotted across the panels, imagery about Campbell and the valley repeats like familiar footsteps retraced. Fragments of pictures migrate from one panel to another. Some elements are subtly altered as if shaped by time or memory. The smaller panels take detours to magnify moments and details embedded within the larger maps.

"The medium of glass has the ability to suspend these drawings in space, like ethereal images hovering in the mind’s eye. As the daylight pours in, the imagery creates a slowly changing play of shadows cast onto the wall. The panels use transparency, layering, and depth in a way that feels both physical and intangible… an echo of how memory and place unfold.”

Sheri Simons

How the Piece was Made:

Hundreds of sketches were developed into final drawings on 14 panels of glass. The panels are hung 1 to 2.5 inches from the wall in order to create space for projected shadows throughout the day. Each piece of glass has two sides, allowing the drawings to be slightly separated and layered onto different surfaces.

For example, some of the panels are a single sheet of 3/8 inch glass, while others are two 1/4 inch pieces layered to become 1/2 inch thickness. The colors and lines of each layer create depth and movement as the viewer looks through the glass.

Four techniques were used on the glass pieces to create different effects. These techniques are sandblasting, hand coloring, printing, and grinding.

Kimberly Jackman, owner/artist of the Jackman Glassworks in Oakland, California managed and fabricated the processes of sandblasting and laminating, design optimization, and collaborative solutions for hardware.

The digital file work and color printing on glass was done by Tallulah Terryll at Magnolia Editions, a fine art print studio in Oakland, California.

A portion of the stencil work was printed at Pixel Perfect Printing by Elizabeth Newman Kuiper in Chico, California.

The work was installed by Silicon Valley Glass, Morgan Hill, CA.

The team at Jayson Architecture in San Francisco designed the fully renovated Campbell Library. Their team created a seamless interface between the library building and the artwork.

The art was designed and created by artist Sheri Simons.