One Song Staircase

The City of Nanaimo invited us to create an artistic intervention in the downtown core that spoke to our community’s collective experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, We reached out to a fellow artist and Nanaimo’s past Poet Laureate, Tina Biello to write a poem around the theme. From that poem we created the One Song Staircase. The full piece reimagines a staircase at Diana Krall Plazan the heart of Nanaimo’s Arts District with bright colours, phrases of poetry, and design aspects rooted in the auditory essence of Tina’s poem. The feature is definitely the radial soundwave in the centre of the space—created from the audio waves of Lauren’s voice reciting the last phrase of “One Song.” The flowing colour fills where the existing contours in the concrete work intersect and bounce off one another while remaining distant. The staircase itself symbolizes the separate but aligned paths that community members are on. We wanted to show tthe relationship of people keeping their distance while finding moments of connectivity.