A massive, hand-dyed silk artwork depicting an aerial view of Mobile Bay found its permanent home this week in the rotunda of GulfQuest National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico, the $62 million downtown Mobile museum set to open later this fall.
The artist behind the piece, a South Carolina-based creator known for large-scale aerial artwork, spent a full day carefully installing the 21-by-30-foot silk batik piece after it had hung finished in her home studio for roughly a year awaiting its debut. The work was created from seven separate 45-inch lengths of silk, sewn together into three panels and rolled onto cylinders that the artist personally transported to Mobile.
Before installation, the artist ironed out wrinkles from the heavy silk panels while tugboats pushed barges down the river visible through the museum’s plate-glass windows, a fitting backdrop for a maritime-themed institution. Once ready, museum staff attached the three panels using wire cables suspended from a 60-foot-high perch in the rotunda, gradually pulling the edges taut until the silk panels resembled ship sails catching the wind.
The artist was first connected to the project in 2010 through an architectural firm that had commissioned her earlier work for a transportation center in Charleston. She signed the formal contract for the GulfQuest commission in 2012, and later flew over Mobile Bay and the Mobile River Delta in an ultralight aircraft to study the landscape before construction on the museum even began. The final design was based on satellite imagery offering a bird’s-eye perspective of the bay and its surrounding rivers and tributaries.
Each of the piece’s 46 distinct colors, including 16 shades of red, was chosen to complement the museum’s own branding, with hues echoing the colors found on container ships that pass through the Port of Mobile. The panels were dyed individually using a specialized process before being seamed together using techniques borrowed from traditional sailmaking.
The artist described the piece as a deliberate counterbalance to the museum’s industrial, maritime character, offering a softer visual element inside a building otherwise centered on shipping and Gulf Coast commerce. She plans to produce silk scarves inspired by the design for sale in the museum’s gift shop once it opens to the public.
Watching the final panel settle into place as afternoon sunlight streamed through the rotunda’s skylight, the artist said the finished installation captured exactly the effect she had envisioned years earlier when the project first began. She said her time working on the commission had left her with a deep appreciation for the Mobile area beyond just the museum itself, citing the region’s food, warmth and welcoming character among the things she had come to love most about the project.