Civic Center Station
In the Living Rock, 2004
Samm Kunce, artist
Artist Samm Kunce’s artwork explores ideas gathered from science and literature. The celebration of inherent beauty of natural materials is a recurrent theme in her work. Kunce’s tile mural at the 1st and Hill St. entrance to the Civic Center station runs the length of the curved planter bed wall. The artist has used a classical composition to reflect the tonal shift of the landscape to the subterranean, and has depicted a hanging garden exquisitely executed in Venetian cake glass mosaic and supported by an expanse of striated sand colored granite. A contrasting black granite ribbon etched with a passage praising the beauty of organic forms from the poet Ovid runs through the center of the piece.
“Organic variation and movement in the glass are suggested in this ancient material when the smalti are left in larger pieces. The mosaic has been set according to the character of key segments allowing a more natural rather than illustrative representation of plant form while the striated granite in its layering refers to geologic time”.