Porch Swings & Fireflies
Large-scale, multi-dimensional, and interactive public art installation.
Bondurant, IA | 2015
Porch Swings and Fireflies is a community gateway and destination public art piece for the City of Bondurant at the intersection of major roadways and a regional bike path system. Inspired by the shared experience of a small town Iowa porch swing, waiting for fireflies to appear at sunset, the integrated art and environment includes multiple porch swings hanging from a serpentine band of barn timbers anchored within an outdoor room of undulating stone formations, land forms and native groves of trees and fields of native grasses and wildflowers, as well as jelly jar “firefly” lighting effects.
Local high school students collaborated on the project as a way to learn how their art can be part of and help create community experience. And to the extent that it is structurally permissible, reclaimed 100-year-old barn timber, sourced from local farms, will be used in the construction of the nine porch swings. To create the “lightning”, representative of the fireflies, LED lighting will be used. The site will offer a functioning swing set, which will create the calming motion associated with rocking, to be seen beneath the gentle glow of the LED lights.
This installation will provide positive pause, a moment of reflection—an interlude from the quotidian busy-ness and constant motion of life. These elements are indicative of one of the highest aims of public art: to create and contribute moments in time and space that provoke questions and spark conversations about where we, as individuals and community, have been; and more importantly, where we are going.
As Bondurant expands and matures as a community, “Porch Swings and Fireflies” will stand as a grand gesture of simple remembrances, symbolic of a means to figuring out the complexities of future together.
