Eric Tadsen
Updraft includes an open arch flanking the bike path near the community gardens.
Whether people are looking at the towering steel arch from afar or passing through its leafy arms, sculptor Mike Burns hopes people experience some of the awe he felt as a child looking up at the sky and trees.
Burns remembers when his grandfather, an electrician, piled all the cousins into the back of a pickup truck and drove to job sites in Illinois. “We’d lie down and stare up at the elm trees. They were huge, like St. Peter’s Cathedral,” says Burns. “When you’re a kid and you’re lying up and looking at the trees, it’s just great. I’ve kept that feeling alive.”
Burns has been working with the Monona Bay Neighborhood Association to design and create an installation called Updraft, which includes an open arch flanking the bike path (the two 20-foot-high pieces are not directly across from one another), four benches and an ornamented (rabbit-proof) fence.
Throughout March, Burns was overseeing the fabrication of the sculpture at Hooper Corp., on Madison’s north side, where a lucky visitor could catch a glimpse of the resting steel towers, whose elegant, curving leaves snake around thick, curved poles.
Burns, an east-side resident, is a professional artist and metalworker who has created public art in the Arboretum, Troy Gardens, the Madison Children’s Museum and Olbrich Gardens. The Brittingham sculpture, due to be installed in the next two weeks, is his most prominent artwork to date.
In the artist’s tool-filled east-side studio/workshop, where Burns is constructing the benches, he demonstrates the project’s evolution, from stacks of drawings, to tiny model, to life-sized wood mockup of the metal monument. In December, Burns oversaw the pouring of several tons of concrete at Brittingham. The concrete will anchor the base of the sculpture, which will be installed with a crane.
At the end stages, Hooper’s expert welders and fabricators did most of the work, with Burns supervising. That company’s in-kind donation is part of the community involvement and investment that has helped the project come to fruition.
Karin Wolf, city arts program administrator, introduced Burns’ work to the Monona Bay Neighborhood Association. “He’s wonderful,” says Wolf. “He’s a community artist guy. Not every artist is willing to work alongside the fundraisers and be there at all the functions.”
Fundraising for Updraft still continues, but the neighborhood association has raised approximately 80% of an $80,000 budget from a combination of private and public monies, beginning with a $5,000 seed grant from the city’s Planning Department.
Wolf says the project — and to a large extent, Brittingham’s turnaround — is part of a conscious effort to involve residents in improving neighborhoods. “We want to keep putting energy into our central city,” says Wolf, “but we also want to reinvest in our neighborhoods and have it be a grassroots, collaborative process. This is an example of where a neighborhood came to us and said ‘we want to do this,’ and we worked hand-in-hand to help them get going.”
Burns calls Updraft “an expression of motion,” evoking leaves caught up in the wind. Because the two pieces of the arch are 40 feet apart, passersby will spend some time within the installation. “This is a metaphor for traveling through, not just passing through,” says Burns, who says he was inspired by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Some of his photographs were black-and-white shots of trees along narrow streets or alleys in France. It’s like a cathedral. That spoke to me, too, as like a sacred space.”
