Submitted Photo
Irish sculptor Alan Milligan, left, and his wife, visual artist Nicole Milligan, are the visionaries behind “Living Waters, Painted Skies.” The award-winning Milligan Studio has created public art in the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union.
RUGBY — The Heartland Bison Ranch, south of Rugby, will be home to a new public art piece for the Region Two Arts Across the Prairie placemaking installation project.
Milligan Studio has been chosen to design and construct a massive 80-foot long and 20-foot high glass feather that artist Nicole Milligan said will be one of the largest glass sculptures in North America, if not the world.
Arts Across the Prairie is a statewide public art program that will create eight large-scale public art installations that reflect the history, landscape and cultural heritage of the space that each piece is in.
Rhea Beto, public information officer and accessibility coordinator for the North Dakota Council on the Arts, said Arts Across the Prairies is meant to create a place and make it significant to that area to boost tourism and stimulate economic activity in rural areas. Beto said the N.D. Legislature allocated $1 million for the program and each region received $150,000. Included in that amount is the $55,000 artist fee to pay for their time, the design, transportation, lodging and per diem. The remaining $95,000 is to be used for fabrication and construction.
Region 2 includes Pierce, McHenry, Bottineau, Renville, Ward, Mountrail and Burke counties.
Alan and Nicole Milligan make up the duo that is Milligan Studio. There are studios in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Alan Milligan is well-known for the Samuel Beckett Chess Set, commissioned by the author’s estate, which has been exhibited throughout Ireland. Nicole Milligan is a historian, visual artist and bestselling author. She began her career as an artist in residence in North Dakota. She spent time in the Turtle Mountains, Rugby and Minot and said she always loved the land and wanted to come back to the prairie.
“In Ireland, public art is history through remembrance. It’s slipping forward. It’s slipping back. It’s also giving places a sense of character. It also creates a physical landmark. … All these pieces that we’ve done all over America, it’s given a uniqueness to each place,” Alan Milligan said.
Nicole Milligan said 50% of all North American waterfowl visit N.D.’s prairie potholes, which largely inspired the choice to construct a feather.
“The actual landscape was sculpted by a glacial gorge so that’s why it has the potholes in it with the water. The whole landscape has actually been carved by nature – it’s such a large scale that we don’t notice because we’re so small in it. But when we take a moment and we enlarge something that to our eyes looks small we start to see the shapes of the land,” Alan Milligan said.
“It’s funny how ideas grow, because we work in the natural world. We’ve lived on the wild Irish sea and we’ve lived in a lot of wonderful places that you walk out the door and beauty just overwhelms you – North Dakota’s like that too. You drive through North Dakota and you can’t help but want to stop and you look at memorations of starlings in the background. It’s beautiful; it’s so stunning. So that idea of paying homage to people who live there and the feather seems to be something that we really wanted to do but it started as a funny idea of, ‘Who cleans all those feathers?’” he said.
The land the feather will sit on is an easement from the Heartland Buffalo Ranch, 21 miles south of Rugby, which the couple is tentatively planning to scout in May. They will spend a few days in Rugby and visit the site at different times of the day, take photographs, paint and determine the proportions of the feather.
Nicole Milligan said as an artist one has to take the whole view into consideration as well as keeping practical things in mind, such as making sure the structure won’t obscure vision in any way or that sun won’t bounce off of it and blind drivers.
“The funny thing about this sort of art is that it’s so architectural – we work so much with the department of transportation. Public art is very much a community-based thing but it’s also an architecturally-based thing because you want to make sure that it’s sheltering and it’s beautiful and it won’t hurt them. There are no sharp objects and kids can’t get their heads wedged in. ‘Can a 3 year old go wedge their head in it? Let’s see,’” she said.
After surveying the land, the Milligans will begin to look at using recycled and cleanly made materials so building the sculpture can remain environmentally friendly. Nicole Milligan said they have to order the glass far in advance because all glass is handmade by four or five craftsmen in the U.S. and taking up this much of their stock is a big ask.
Once the studio gets all of the stock in, the Milligans will start chipping away, panel by panel to create their vision. The glass panels will be three-fourths to 1-inch thick and shatterproof, making them tough enough to withstand N.D. weather.
“When you think of glass you don’t realize it’s made from silica, which is basically the byproduct of an exploding star, and it never fades. The color always remains true. There’s so much minerality in it. The pink has actual gold in it. It is the most natural and the longest lasting – the death of two universes is the rate of decay for that piece of glass. It’s a celebration to the future too,” Nicole Milligan said.
The couple is trying to make a connection with an international filming company to document the creation of this one-of-a-kind sculpture.
“It’s a celebration of this land and this place and this time and these people. We want to make it beautiful and we want it to embody their hearts and their own light. We talk about, when we make glass, about the wild light and so what we’re doing is we’re capturing your wild light – the wild light of your heart, the wild light of your life. … We defy gravity with joy, and that is what we do to celebrate life,” Nicole Milligan said.
