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Capitol Hill Artwork

The Seattle Public Library board of trustees selected lighting artist Iole Alessandrini to design artwork for the new Capitol Hill Branch of The Seattle Public Library. Alessandrini’s background is in fine art, architecture, furniture and lighting design. She works with “light and dark, shadows and reflections, time and space, sound and silence” to achieve her memorable installations.

The Capitol Hill Branch is Alessandrini’s first permanent work with light. The light is designed to illuminate a vertical screen of 36 different plants that, over time, will grow up a stainless steel mesh to cover most of the building. The low-energy, long-life fluorescent lights are located in the 2 feet of space between the brick walls of the branch building and the stainless steel mesh.

Library users will have to be patient to see the full effect of the artwork, because the lights won’t be turned on until the plants – a combination of evergreen and deciduous vines – have grown 3 or 4 feet up the building. Together, nature and light will augment the perception of a building that is both library and garden, and never looks the same.

The motif will continue inside the building, where a similar structure of steel mesh, light and climbing plants will anchor four interior corners.

Artist’s inspiration

“The world, the real, the apparently real and the unreal, is the source and background to my inquiry for my creations. Through manipulation of physical spaces, light, and digital media, I design and build ephemeral, controlled environments that people enter rather than observe from a distance. Within a field of mediated experiences, awareness of being emerges. The body moves in a flowing state of sensorial alterations and, opened by possibilities, meanings develop.”

-- Capitol Hill Branch artist Iole Alessandrini

Alessandrini’s projects include Seattle’s new football stadium, exhibition hall and parking garage; “Carmen” with the Pacific Northwest Ballet; “Truth is not a Sentence” with 911 Media Arts Center; and numerous projects in Italy. She has shown her work at the Bellevue Art Museum, at the water tower in Volunteer Park, in Magnuson Park as part of the HorseHead Sculpture Project, and at the remains of a historical site in Tacoma with the Season of Light Committee.

Alessandrini, who was born in Italy, has a fine arts degree from First Fine Arts School in Rome, a master’s degree in architecture from University La Sapienza in Rome, and a master’s degree in architecture with an emphasis on lighting from the University of Washington. Alessandrini lives in Seattle.

Content modified: 8 August 2003

12/30/2005