In January of 2022, I installed “A Soft Landing” in Building Five. Between the lingering Covid pandemic and the cold building, I was often the only one there. I loved the way the winter light shone through the clerestory windows and illuminated the walls. I wondered about the scaffolding, conduit pipes and metal brackets. The name for this installation, “Ghost ship”, described what Building Five was to me. A mystical place, still referencing its past abandonment. The Ghost Ship of Oakland Ca. crossed my mind. Creative energy lost. The disastrous fire receding into history uncomfortably fast.

 I saw Cristy Nyboer’s show forgottenlake.com, in 2022. Cristy’s installation was about Guild’s Lake. The place where Building Five now stands is on the unceded lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples. By 1900, the original peoples were kicked out and the swamp dredged to make Guild’s Lake. In 1905, the lake became the site of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. After the exposition, the lake was filled in. This is where Building Five was constructed as a foundry in 1940. Active until 1989, Northwest Marine Iron Works made and repaired ship machinery. The buildings were abandoned when NWMIW went bankrupt. With “Ghost Ship”, I wanted to continue telling the story.

 To suggest Building Five’s connection to the ocean, I created a loose timeline on the floor using salt. The beginning and the thread running through the timeline is the water, its relentless motion of seafoam and shoreline spread out on the concrete floor. As you advance through the years, the footprints of workers fill the space. At the end a huge mooring rope floats in the ocean, untethered and unraveling. 

 The white sail fans out from the ceiling channeling the hopes of those who used to work here. The sail floats close to, but never touches the floor. An industrial fan ripples the stationary sail. Around the sail, I placed industrial chains in giant loops that hung from the ceiling to the walls. An 18’ black circle is on the far wall, a charcoal black eclipsed sun, the abandoned furnace, an uncanny anchor in the back of the space.

I used repurposed materials. The mooring rope was ocean trash collected with “ghost nets” from the ocean. The “chains” were retired climbing ropes. The sail was a borrowed movie screen. The black sun was a retired tarpaulin. The salt was ordinary table salt. I swept up the salt to save it for use in a future installation. 

Brendan Rall composed the music. He combined sounds of water, birds, machinery, ship horns and recordings of people to create the composition. The music complements the timeline in the salt, beginning as water and building up in complexity to peak with the horns and the crowd. At the end there is quiet as everyone leaves to do something else and the water returns.

I continued to expand the pattern on the floor for the duration of the residency. The timeline is never finished.

-Julie Rall  

julierall.com

@julierall