Soft Services, commissioned by Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, consists of a series of sixteen stone benches: fourteen placed throughout Seattle’s Volunteer Park, with two additional sculptures residing outside the Henry itself. Each bench is engraved with its own inscription—artist-written text that both stands alone and creates a larger meaning across the series of seating—and a silhouetted image applied in light-responsive pigment, which allows the image to shift slightly based on the time of day, weather conditions, and sight lines. The project examines themes of cultivation and wildness, the laws we impose to control human bodies, hierarchy and proximity, and stones as memorials, boundaries, and legislative markers.

Throughout Volunteer Park, installation sites are occupied by a single bench, or in groupings of up to three, creating both individually meditative and social spaces for visitors. The engraved text on each sculpture is in the font Optima, chosen by American designer and sculptor Maya Lin for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. This font thereafter became a standard for memorial writing, but is also commonly used by contemporary wellness and healthcare brands. Lin’s remembrance of those killed in the war was unveiled at a time the country was experiencing another epidemic: AIDS. While that moment of memorialization and tragic loss resonates with our current pandemic experience and that of larger global aggression, it also ties to the local histories of Volunteer Park as a site for AIDS activism—ultimately grappling with the ongoing politics of isolation, shame, care, and what binds us in sickness and in health.

The title, Soft Services, is a phrase drawn from my research and interviews with members of the activist community, in reference to the care efforts made during the height of the AIDS crisis. At the time, the rare opportunity arose to use the Ryan White (CARE Act) monies towards “soft services”—aspects of support deemed assistive but not strictly necessary and as such not covered by traditional healthcare (massage, meal trains, dog walking, etc.) Through this installation, I explore the notion of what care means, what we define as essential versus optional, and who has access to it, questions of heightened importance at this moment of crisis and recovery.

Each sculpture also features the silhouette of a plant. I conducted research on local plant-life and the effects of human intervention, deliberately or transitively via environmental effect. The black locust was introduced to Volunteer Park by the Olmsted Brothers when it was designed, and thus not native to the area. The alder is native to the park and still exists within it. While western juniper, according to climate change specialists, will likely be coming to the Pacific Northwest region (thus the park) in the coming years, as Seattle’s climate warms. Each plant also has many medicinal uses and mythological histories that played a part in my selection.