Chris Miller: Bringing a Carousel of Animals to Public Spaces
Every month PelotonLabs co-founder Liz Trice interviews a local community member. This month, Liz caught up with Chris Miller, a public artist and sculptor who TempoArts recently selected to create seven animal sculptures for the Western Promenade.
Tell me about the 7 animal sculptures you recently installed at the Western Prom.
They are all animals that at some point lived on, near, or above the Western Prom, or on a prehistoric location like Pangea, or the sea above it, when there were oceans above this land… Some are based on inaccurate historical representations – like the dragon is based on an illustration of the constellation Draco based on a 9th century manuscript from Persia, and a sea monster known as a steipereidur.
We made a whale, a walrus, a polar bear, a saber tooth cat, a rhynchosaur, a dragon, and a protocetid, an ancestor of whales that used to walk on land.
There was an ancestor of whales that used to walk on land? And there were saber tooth cats here?
Yeah! There aren’t many fossils in Maine because of glaciers and soil types, but there was a mammoth found in Saco, and saber tooth cats were generally found to be predators of mammoths. So it’s an educated guess that there were saber tooth cats here at the end of the last ice age.
And there are fossil records that show that 60 million years ago animals known as Protocetids – that looked something like dogs – started living in the water and gradually became whales. They’ve been found everywhere that had shallow coastal waters. It’s counterintuitive that animals might have first evolved in water, then moved to land to become mammals, and then gone back into the water. That said, whales are doing a lot better than dinosaurs, so going back to the water was probably a good idea.
What kind of projects would you love to create in the future?
I’m interested in designed space – buildings, interiors, landscapes, any kind of material or size mural, or sculpture, or space design. The common thread of my projects that I love the most are things that allow people to exercise their curiosity and cultivate a sense of wonder, or to point out the everyday magic of living together on earth in the here and now.
What are you most excited about reading right now that inspired you?
There’s a book called “The Bear” by Andrew Krivak. It’s meant to be a biography of the last person on earth, living in the wild, after some unmentioned apocalypse several generations ago, and about her relationship with some animals that may or may not be imagined. More importantly, it’s a story about someone who is trying to be a good person, living in a graceful way in harmony with nature, totally alone. It’s very uplifting.
Another book, “Grief is the Thing with Feathers,” by Max Porters. It’s about a family that is grieving, and their grief is personified by a crow, which is a literary reference to a book of poems by Ted Hughs, Silvia Plath’s widower. Fascinating and very sad, but also uplifting in surprising ways.
You’re also the public artist for the Bramhall Square redesign. Tell me about that. Why bears?
It was my first public art proposal. I grew up around a lot of bears, saw bears very frequently, and had recurrent dreams, sometimes nightmares, about bears. Growing up in rural Minnesota, in the afternoon, black bears would come and soak up the heat on our driveway like giant cats. I remember my mom waking me up to show me a black bear standing on its hind legs about five feet away on the other side of a sliding patio door chewing on one of our bird feeders. I never had any really scary experiences, but actual bears made an impression on me.
I’ve even used bears as illustrations in architectural drawings. I drew people sleeping safely inside a building while bears went through their trash. It was meant to be silly but only half!
My oldest child recently pointed out that everything I do is a little silly – and that’s intentional. I like where the Bramhall Square sculpture proposal landed because it’s at least 80% imaginary. That’s also a good budget strategy.
Your next project is a mural on the ceiling of South Portland Middle School. Tell me about that.
It will be my first public art project outside the West End! The Middle school community voted overwhelmingly to have their mascot be sharks, and my mural will be of huge indigo sharks on the ceiling of a corridor about 12 feet wide by 100 feet long.
More information:
Carousel Cosmos Art Website: http://npdworkshop.com/carousel-cosmos
Tempo Arts: https://tempoartmaine.org
PelotonLabs is a co-working space in the West End of Portland, Maine with a mission to connect and encourage people working on their own to manifest their visions without fear.
